Western Union is one of the largest digital money firms, uniquely positioned to connect the cash and digital worlds across platforms, devices, borders, and currencies. While Singh and his team have been occupied with the technology transformation taking place at Western Union, the breakneck speed at which the financial services and payments industry is changing means they also have to be planning for the longer-term. We use OutSystems in multiple layers of our tech stack, says Tom. They can include creating strategy placemats (one-page strategy overviews that are easily shared), frequent team huddles, one-on-one coaching, and process confirmation. Western Union has the infrastructure to help make that a reality. arrow_forward. - Access cash back rewards at the WU store. Using OutSystems for customer-facing digital experiences, back office, and workflow solutions, Western Union launched new digital banking services in two countries in just 11 months. Chief Data and Innovation Officer, Western Union, Enterprise-grade scalability and security, Cloud-based IT architecture based on microservices. Media, Madison Square Digital transformation starts with people, which is a useful reminder that . One of its most high-profile hires was Harveer Singh, who was appointed as Chief Data Architect & Global Head of Engineering and previously co-led EYs Next Generation architecture & solutions for Financial Services. Youre expected to come up with new ways of innovation to drive revenue growth across the organization. 1 (March 1990), pp. To address this new competitive landscape, Western Union sought an agility boost to accelerate innovation. All of that is dependent on people in the organization putting resources behind this kind of an agile transformation. Western Union will likely face internal resistance from three sources. Many of its 150 million customers worldwide depend on money transfers to pay for food, electricity, medication, and other necessities. I have successfully directed virtual teams working on Mastercard integrations, Western Union and MoneyGram. My role was to bring all of these different teams together and instil a culture that recognised it wasnt just about how fast we were going, but also about the quality of the product were delivering.. So youre really talking about game-changing differences between how processes worked before and after. . As a company, Western Union is in the middle of a transformational moment. Western Union. "As a digital enabler and a pioneer in the digital transformation, we aspire to play a vital role in the vision of the Saudi . He also praises Snowflakes adaptability when it came to dealing with huge capacity increases. When people from different departments do these floor walks together, theyre realizing that they actually have a lot more in common with each other or notice areas where they can collaborate that they didnt realize before. Second, Western Unions employees may not have the knowledge or training to effectively lead Western Unions digital transformation, and may resist digital initiatives or operational changes. To that end, Singh has built on an existing relationship to forge a highly valuable partnership with Salesforce and oversee the roll-out of its industry-leading Marketing Cloud. Their bread and butter business is charging hefty fees on remittances and their core advantage was a network of retail outlets and agents across the US and partners around the world to get cash from one family member to another. How Western Union achieved Digital Transformation with Infosys and Oracle. Mohua is a marketing leader with over 15 years of experience in building and leading brands across industries. McKinsey's Kausik Rajgopal and Lang Davison recently sat down with Western Union's CEO to talk about its multicultural customer base (and . These are seismic factors currently redefining our world, earning their own epochal moniker: The Fourth Industrial Revolution. A doctor in London taps an app on her phone to transfer 500 pounds. | Learn more about Rokas kudas's work experience, education, connections & more by visiting their profile on . Deep divides in digital connectivity, internet use, and access remain. Though its too early for results, the response from consumers has been positive, he says. People who knew how a team or a group worked before can come in and see its night-and-day different. Manufacturing, Information Services Every year or two we rescore ourselves in a company-wide exercise to see where were making progress and where were falling behind. Knowledge Institute, Chemical Navigating complex land title issues would also leverage Western Unions existing capabilities of dealing with a range of government regulations. Each quarter our research team identifies on-prem and cloud applications that are being used by the 11000 Western Union employees from the public (Press Releases, Customer References . If you are a new customer: now you can transfer your FIRST money transfer for FREE*. For decades, Western Union benefited from network effects as it added density and new geographies. Beyond the public health crisis, COVID-19 has had a devastating impact on personal finances, causing poverty levels and inequality to rise globally. We position ourselves as creating opportunity for financial inclusion by bridging gaps in the financial services sector. Having found great success with its Marketing Cloud, Singh outlines his longer-term vision to connect a number of Western Unions central products. Business Unit Represents Approximately 7% of Company Revenue . Western Union reduced data warehousing costs by 50% and has saved millions through streamlined data engineering and administration after moving more than 30 data stores, including on-premises data, into Snowflake. We also innovated to make our services more inclusive for customers by creating new ways to send funds digitally and offering real-time digital account payouts. WU's platform provides seamless cross-border flows, and its leading global financial network bridges more than 200 countries and territories and over 130 currencies. Assignment: Driving Digital Transformation, AIG & Cyber Insurance Learning to Insure a Digital World, The First Transcontinental Telegram was sent to DC 155 Years Ago, Form 10-K for the year ended December 2017, How Blockchain Could Help Emerging Markets Leap Ahead, Beyond the Hype: What Blockchain could mean for Africa, Western Union is Testing Ripple and XRP for Money Transfers, Western Union Brings Money Transfer and Its Tricky Fees to Chat Apps, Emirates NBD, an almost perfect digital transformation, B2B business solutions (cross-border and cross-currency). It took six months to do the bare minimum. This does have privacy implications and hence needs to be vetted out with regulatory authorities around the world. Lean deployments are a big piece of our overall transformation program. 2023Western Union Holdings, Inc. All Rights Reserved. The gap between access and use is growing, with 56% of people in . We offer consumers the choices they want, both for sending and receiving money, he stresses. Digital transformation in Western Union must be driven from the top-down. Key takeaways. These strategies are paying off. Discover how Santander Consumer Finance replaced 70% of their core IT systems in three years with OutSystems. Specifically,. With a strong base of over 4 million customers and an established regional brand in the fast-growing digital wallet market, Western Union believes that stc pay is poised to experience strong growth in the future. Convera. And if Western Union doesnt embrace and transform along with those technologies, it will fade away just like the telegraph. Technology, Industrial - Earn My WU points. Thats really enabled a lot more collaboration across groups. Leading fintech, Mambu, provides the platform and engine that drives the core of Western Union's new digital bank. Since 2008, Huawei has offered a wide and expanding range of . Team members were drawn from different continents and operating on different time zones. After the catastrophic explosion in Lebanon in 2020, the two companies worked together to build data pipelines to help those affected by the incident and provide support to agents in the area. Western Union has gained a comprehensive view of the customer while running the Data Cloud on AWS. The network upgrade will pave the way for Econet to deliver 5G connectivity in more . It requires a change in process and culture, the adoption of a common lingo, executive buy-in, and a center of excellence to ensure enterprise-wide success. Hiring experienced developers was already hard, and the skills drought got even worse with the great resignation. Salesforce has been such an important part of the digital experience journey.. The company wanted to improve the digital experiences offered to customers and build new digital bankingproducts to extend its relationship with customers. Board Committees. For more details about how Western Union went from 34 on-prem data warehouses to pursuing a multi-cloud strategy based on Snowflake, read our case study. What does "digital transformation" mean to Western Union? Western Union is trying to use Blockchain as an incremental or modular innovation, when in fact it could be an architectural orradical innovation (see chart below) introducing entirely new businesses that fit well into Western Unions existing capabilities. Many CEOs are lured into spending too much time on legacy businesses, which don't need CEO oversight. [8]. Teams that may not previously have interacted with each other are now doing floor walks with each other. How did you evolve for digital convenience and safety? Faced with numerous applications to deliver, the need to rapidly iterate customer experiences, and the steep learning curve for new Cloud DevOps toolchains, Western Union decided to evaluate low-code platforms. Western Union is to shed its Business Solutions unit, with investment firms Goldfinch and Baupost set to acquire the business for $910 million in cash. Group, Infosys Revenue Management Platform for Banking, About Tom Mazzaferro, Chief Data Officer at Western Union together with Nick Halsey, CEO at Okera talk about the technology that Western Union has adopted to help build new products and Western Union, Chief Data Officer: Digital Transformation Initiatives (Part 3) | Cloud | cdomagazine.tech Big data has helped Western Union merge data across multiple channels for years, for marketing and promotion, customer lifecycle management, compliance and fraud modeling. New-found agility delivers growth and improved Customer Experience for partners and customers. In 2017 SEED supported 20 projects, impacting 5,000 children and youth; we hope to support event more in 2018.. The culture change has to be driven across teams to show how technology has enabled different and better outcomes. Wingspan, Infosys Transfers can be delivered in cash or into a digital wallet or a bank account via electronic funds transfer. Please enable Javascript to see this feature. Western Union is doing that. Its reach is staggering: present in more than 200 countries and territories, transacting in 130+ currencies, with approximately 150 million people having used Western Union to either send or receive funds over the last year. "As users turn to our services in bigger numbers and as many new digital players come to the market, we know we have to change," he says. The center of excellence keeps things on track and makes sure we follow a framework and are tracking the results, so that we can measure the impact of the transformation across the whole organization. On March 1, Huawei held a "Digital Leadership Seminar" during Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2023 in Barcelona, Spain, attended by more than 60 high-level customers from global carriers, government enterprises, and KOL. Becoming digital first meant we needed to deliver fast, frictionless experiences, especially on mobile. Everest Group Low-Code Application Development Platforms PEAK Matrix 2022. But its really all about allowing the manager to observe the way their employee works, whats easy about that job and whats hard about that job. Western Union uses a central team to build new capabilities across the business. That created a need to act. As the transformation gets embedded into the organization, the businesses start to run their own agile deployments. As mobile payments and blockchain tech challenge the status quo of cross-border money transfers, Western Union must digitally transform itself at the right pace or risk going the way of the telegraph. Start Time: 16:30 January 1, 0000 5:32 PM ETThe Western Union Company (NYSE:NYSE:WU)Q3 2022 Earnings Conference CallNovember 01, 2022, 16:30 PM ETCompany ParticipantsDevin McGranahan -. These are more tactical, day-to-day ways to implement lean across the organization. We are also launching new products into the market, including a pilot for digital banking services in select markets in Europe and a revamped loyalty programme, which require us to capture data from our central warehouses to drive decision making, marketing and customer acquisition. When we started the transformation project, we came at it from the perspective of this being a cultural transformation just as much as a process transformation. Its more about having the manager understand how the work actually gets done on the floor. Today, structured and semi-structured data can easily coincide. Youre starting to see that happen culturally. Singh was brought in to help facilitate that leap, drawing on his expertise with business transformations, technology management, data architecture and collaborative working, backed up by various consulting roles at Deloitte, IBM and Accenture. We saw that our revenue and customer base didnt reflect the opportunity and size of the market.. Western Uniona global leader in cross-border, cross-currency money movement and paymentsis driving a company-wide transformation, which includes migrating its infrastructure from on-prem to the Cloud. Secure, touchless, digital money transfers were a safe, reliable way for people to send funds where they needed to, so we leaned in there. Today customers can commence their journey on our mobile App, pay for their transaction digitally or opt to pay cash from any of our participating Western Union retail locations, use wu.com or go directly to any of the 1,200 agent locations or Western Union-owned locations in Austria[i]. The aim of this paper is to sketch a brief history of complex digital transformation of media and . For example, we began offering an option for telephone money transfer. If Western Union tries to grow its blockchain capabilities within current operations, internal resistors may directly or indirectly sabotage the initiatives. Were there tools or technology that were particularly helpful in your transformation? The Baupost Group is a $31 billion Boston-based investment firm. You stepped in as CMO just as COVID-19 was emerging, and I cant imagine that a global health crisis was what youd envisioned for your first 100 days. The primary reason we decided to go through with this transformation is that we saw an opportunity to positively impact revenue through our daily operations and behaviors. Cole heads the 169-year-old company's digital transformation efforts, including the design and development of the software powering those consumer-facing platforms. Western Union is a partner of the World Economic Forum (WEF) and is a leading voice in the conversation of how to build a global payments ecosystem, which is stable and where remittances can be made much faster. We go where our customers go, says Khalid Fellahi, senior vice president and general manager for Western Union Digital, based in San Francisco. Western Union and Beforepay Offer 'Send Now, Pay Later' Service to Consumers for International Money Transfers s full anLearn more about the data lake, a repository for structured, unstructured, and semi-structured data that provided direct access to raw organizational data. Consumers can 'Send Now, Pay Later' by borrowing up to AUD 2000 through Beforepay's wage-advance product on Western Union's digital channels. That makes it much easier to go into other areas of the organization and say, We did this in this part of the company. We wanted plug-and-play convenience to integrate any technology.. Not just front-end, but back office and our contact center. . My team and I had thought of the future being digital, of course, but the pandemic really forced us to make it a reality for the business. We caught up with Mazzaferro to dive deeper into how the Data Cloud enables ongoing digital transformation at Western Union: Snowflake: Tom, as CDIO you lead the charge on keeping Western Union at the forefront of data economy leadership. Meeting the moment with solutions required Western Union to accelerate its own digital transformation. Western Union is a global leader in cross-border, cross-currency money movement and payments. [2] Westar 1, Wikipedia, accessed April 2018. This would help Western Union objectively pursue new blockchain opportunities, even if those opportunities eventually cannibalize or destroy its existing C2C business. Sub-Saharan Africa 3G and 4G mobile broadband coverage stands at 86% and 57% of the population, respectively. [8]David Thomas, Beyond the Hype: What Blockchain could mean for Africa, African Business Magazine, Feb. 26, 2018. Contributed to establishing Quality Assurance, Training and Documentation strategy and processes for AML Operations functions. The Western Union Foundation is a separate charitable corporation that is tax-exempt under 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, contributions to which are tax-deductible for US income tax purposes. The reason for that is due to the huge increase in demand for our digital services as lockdowns were implemented across many different geographies. [7]For a helpful overview of how Blockchain is being used in emerging markets, see Vinay Gupta & Rob Knight, How Blockchain Could Help Emerging Markets Leap Ahead, Harvard Business Review, May 17, 2017. [3], Western Union operates in three segments, with most of its revenues (79%) coming from the C2C segment: [4], Western Union became the dominant player in cross-border C2C money transfers through a platform strategyit connected people who wanted to send money across borders. We see ourselves as becoming a FinTech that can move quickly while being sure that our infrastructure and processes allow us to work at scale. The pilots help get buy-in across the organization, and then once we have that buy-in, it provides the resources necessary to scale. Commenting on the advantages of development on OutSystems, Tom says, "We estimate that we're getting new products . Product Director, United States Money Transfer. In 2011, Western Union opened an office in San Francisco to ramp up its digital operation. Western Union can leverage such physical presence to win this new innovative space. One of these customers is Tom Mazzaferro, Chief Data & Innovation Officer of Western Union, which serves more than 100 million global customers through approximately 600,000 retail locations, and via its digital platforms. Institute, Infosys Innovation In just 11 months, we delivered a full-service digital banking experience that expands our relationship with customers.. Most of the customers for remittance service (e.g. <br><br>My Leadership Philosophy<br><br>I am an . From the CEO down through his executive team, you see a real commitment to this transformation exercise and a real commitment to finding ways to optimize our processes, to get efficiencies, and to fund those investments that will drive topline revenue growth. When fully realised, he says, it will give Western Union the agility it is seeking, while also having a positive impact on its bottom line. your next, Infosys As weve done that, everyone has started to speak the same language, whether its talking about going to huddles, doing process confirmations, conducting one-on-one coaching, or maybe doing floor walks. Western Union built its platform by assembling a global network of third party agents. Singh was given autonomy to mould his teams, combining the skills already at Western Union with external talent, many of which were from a consulting background, resulting in a diverse and varied team, which he says proved invaluable.
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