Data safety. Jay Jaffin was just starting his role as Western Union's chief marketing officer when the pandemic arrived. 8 (Managing the Strategy Development Process). Deloitte announces multi-year collaboration with AWS to co-innovate and engineer solutions that help institutions expedite the launch of digital banking services and modernize their legacy core banking stacks. [2]But today, new technologies are threatening Western Unions entire business model. Not satisfied with the idea of incremental change, the company took a start-from-scratch approach, assembling an experienced team and transforming its infrastructure. Many of its 150 million customers worldwide depend on money transfers to pay for food, electricity, medication, and other necessities. So youre really talking about game-changing differences between how processes worked before and after. Data and insights gave us the ability to make important strategic decisions in the throes of what could have been a panic. Inclusion, Bloomberg
Thats not to say cloud is always cheap, it can be expensive but we have a very stringent Review Board to keep our costs in check, so cost reduction is something about which we are confident.. At its core is a migration from on-prem to a cloud-based infrastructure, which it believes is key to allowing the organisation to scale and evolve into a company with the clout of an established financial institution combined with the agility and flexibility of a modern FinTech. When people send money to friends or family across the country or around the world, chances are good that Western Union is involved. As the transformation gets embedded into the organization, the businesses start to run their own agile deployments. We built the Western Union Way team, or the WU Way team as we call it, with ten high-potential individuals from around the company. He praises the vendor support and namechecks first AWS for enabling the organisation to quicken the pace of its procurement process and spin up workloads to the cloud faster than had originally been anticipated. 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. My mission is to empower people to become economically self-reliant. An advantage of Western Unions omnichannel approach is that it includes all customers, whether they are integrated or not in the financial system: the banked, the underbanked, and the unbanked. Patrick Gauthier, CEO of Convera, formerly known as Western Union Business Solutions. Western Union Digital Services Enhanced in the UAE with Mobile App and Online Access; ITFC and Dubai Exports host B2B Forum to Promote Agri-Food Trade between Arab and African Countries under the Arab Africa Trade Bridges Program; GBM and Banfico partner to support the Kingdom's efforts for a more digitalized financial sector We set up virtual war rooms, met with our executive team daily to strategize, and spoke to customers every week to keep a pulse on their needs. 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. These are things like rewards and recognition, top-down innovation, and consequence management. 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]. Nov 2011 - Present11 years 5 months. Really understand the business stakeholders problem and how you can fix or enable it. The company, which has been in the money-transfer business since 1871, launched online transfers via WU.com in 2000 and got into mobile money transfers in 2007. We wanted plug-and-play convenience to integrate any technology.. Western Union International Bank is licensed by the Austrian Financial Market Authority. Cole heads the 169-year-old company's digital transformation efforts, including the design and development of the software powering those consumer-facing platforms. For example, helping African countries develop official land registers could eliminate a huge barrier to investment and capital inflows (e.g., by resolving uncertain and disputed land titles). Digital Bulletin exists to tell the story. As consumer expectations continue to evolve, digital will play an ongoing role in helping financial services brands deliver value to their customers and drive business growth. 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. 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. That allowed us to go from ten people to about 50 change agents in the first wave, which will be able to support 2,500 employees and 4,000 vendor full-time employees within two years. Security, Infosys
These agents typically manage retail stores across the world, and offer Western Union money transfer services in exchange for a commission. A doctor in London taps an app on her phone to transfer 500 pounds. In the past several years, the Englewood, Colo.-based company has made a point to develop and [] [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. 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. Western Union operates in the increasingly competitive, rapidly changing payments sector, where new fintech players are changing how the market operates. The Western Union Foundation is actively supporting NGOs that help refugees and migrants around the globe through education and financial literacy. The transition from legacy systems to Oracle Solutions was critical to the strategy's success. And, Fellahi points out, When you look at customer acquisition on our digital channel, 80 percent of the customers we acquired in the past 12 months are new to usnot migrated from our traditional customer base., He expects digital money transfer and mobile technology to be the major driver of overall growth in coming years, adding, In the U.S., over 65 percent of WU.com transactions are initiated on a mobile device, and globally it is nearly 60 percent.. Salesforce has been such an important part of the digital experience journey.. Technology or Operations transformation . Updated on. OutSystems High-Performance Low-Code Platform Powers Western Union Digital Banking Solution 2 min. Seven months after Goldfinch Partners and The Baupost Group announced they were purchasing Western . Mohua Das Gupta - Head of Marketing, Tata CliQ. Transfers can be delivered in cash or into a digital wallet or a bank account via electronic funds transfer. He shares his views on digital transformation and economic opportunities for all. We're making content recommendations better for thousands of readers. Every year or two we rescore ourselves in a company-wide exercise to see where were making progress and where were falling behind. How Western Union Became a Global Digital Front-Runner for Cross-Border Payments Money By Jay Jaffin, Head of Global Digital, Western Union May 24, 2021. Teams that may not previously have interacted with each other are now doing floor walks with each other. Migrants, who typically are the link between cash economies underserved by financial institutions, and highly bancarized, digital economies, benefit from Western Unions unique ability to combine the physical and the digital. The Baupost Group is a $31 billion Boston-based investment firm. Snowflake: What do you see changing now that your organization is better able to share data? Introducing the next-generation operating model, Winning with your talent-management strategy. Feb 7, 2023. Top retailers use AI-powered campaigns to engage their most valuable customers. Mazzaferro: Keep it simple. Now data is the driver and applications are being developed to handle that data and represent it to business stakeholders to make it consumable. . Rapid growth in technology was making it easy for international money transfers to take place online, Fellahi recalls. Why Do Companies Choose to Outsource Work? Western Union now has more than 550,000 agent locations in more than 200 countries. While WU is considered a global leader in their space, competitive insights and . Digital transformation in the EUBenefitting people, the economy and the environment. First, for continuity of services. Revenue from Western Union's digital money transfer services spiked from $600 million in 2019 to over $850 million in 2020. So we had to figure out how to continue to show up for customers while also ensuring everyones health and safely. Western Union is the worlds first P2P company. First, Western Unions third party agents may try to thwart any concerted moves to digital platforms, seeing such a move as a threat to existing commission revenues. I want to see those same results in my organization. I think thats an indication of how well its really working across the company. Here is Swamy Sivasubramaniyan, Head of Financial Services and Settlement Platform for Western Union, discussing the digital transformation experience with Infosys and Oracle. The map, Barmer and Newman say, is designed to do precisely that turn the western Pennsylvania fish-fry culture into an adventure stamped onto the landscape that fosters community engagement . Profiles, Infosys Knowledge
Business Unit Represents Approximately 7% of Company Revenue . 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. But new innovators are highlighting a problem for Western Union: multi-homing is high with money transfers. Jay Jaffin was just starting his role as Western Unions chief marketing officer when the pandemic arrived. When people send money to friends or family across the country or around the world, chances are good that Western Union is involved. Created: 05-05-2021 - 17:15. In order to fund the investments, we decided that it was really important to do a transformation exercise, look for ways to gain efficiencies and effectiveness across our processes and procedures, and then use those efficiencies to fund the growth investments. Services, High
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. Digital transformation in Western Union must be driven from the top-down. It is far more stable than that and can be used for near instant settlements across the board, while providing liquidity to Reserve Banks. It's a physical branding and marketing component that few money-transfer providers can match - but one that's of diminishing value in a digital world. Digital transformation in the EU. The scale of change this represents for a business like Western Union is not to be underestimated; the company employs around 11,000 people and has more than 550,000 retail agents locations within . Jaffin: Its important for us to continue trying new technology that gets us closer to customers and their changing needs, like advanced analytics and other tools. That helps us refocus on the particular market-shaper practices that we need to double down on in order to continue improving during our transformation journey. 9-30 (describing four types of innovations incremental, modular, architectural and radical classified by their impact on a business core components and the relationships between those core components). Infosys accelerated Western Union's digital transformation by harmonizing agent operations, implementing billing and collection standards, enabling modular growth, accelerating new product launches, enabling digital on-demand procedures, designing global accounting solutions based on one single template, supporting highly complex pricing and multiple business models, and massive management processes as a strategic technology partner. [8]David Thomas, Beyond the Hype: What Blockchain could mean for Africa, African Business Magazine, Feb. 26, 2018. Talends technology has been used similarly in response to people impacted by floods in Haiti and to Indian citizens at the height of the countrys COVID-19 crisis. As a global leader in cross-border, cross-currency money movement and payments, Western Union has to comply with a huge number of financial regulations. Enterprise Technology Operations Center Manager. 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. But for all its success, Western Union is undoubtedly a legacy player in a market that has been truly disrupted in recent years, with smaller and more agile outfits making waves in the increasingly digitised payments space. Chief Data and Innovation Officer, Western Union, Enterprise-grade scalability and security, Cloud-based IT architecture based on microservices. That system is fine in a cash based economy, but is becoming increasingly cumbersome as digital payments take hold in emerging markets. Western Union's digital banking platform is a complex ecosystem of partnerships from across the technology and fintech landscape. Discover how Santander Consumer Finance replaced 70% of their core IT systems in three years with OutSystems. In the same way that they say it takes a whole village to raise a child, it takes an army of people with the right skillsets and approaches to undertake a challenge like this. The fusion of the digital and the physical, the irrepressible rise of new technologies. It's a physical branding and marketing component that few money-transfer providers can match but one that's of diminishing value in a digital world. As such, when Western Union embarked on its technology transformation, it was keen to recruit personnel who could help achieve its vision. A lot of our big data environment is still on-prem and the mission is to move that completely to the cloud by the end of the year. With a history of more than 170 years, the company has a presence in more than 200 countries and territories, connecting more than 120m people to one another and to the global economy, through cross-border money transfers in approximately 130 currencies. Commenting on the speed comparison of OutSystems compared to previous traditional development, Tom said, "On an earlier project, we had ten people working on a pricing and UX project. As we get the pilots completed, the idea is to turn the WU Way team into more of a center of excellence. The international roll-out continues to other countries at pace. Western Union International Bank GmbH is regulated by the Financial Markets Authority in Austria, [i] Agent location count valid as of 31 December 2017. Convera. The transformation of Western Digital to a Live Enterprise Modernization of legacy enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications provides an opportunity for a technical upgrade as well as a transformation of the core business, according to IDC. Leaders across many industries and companies of all sizes report that one of their biggest challenges is siloed data. While the pace of change has been considerable, the leadership team at Western Union has been focused on implementing a large-scale technology transformation. One moment later, in Shimla, a hill country city in India, close to the ridge of the Himalayan foothills, a cashier at the . . If you are a new customer: now you can transfer your FIRST money transfer for FREE*. We will expand our Messenger bot to other countries and add other languages, he adds. Union Pacific, the railroad company that transports chemicals, coal, food, minerals and automobiles in and around 23 Western U.S. states, has had two workhorses that toiled tirelessly for the past . Western Union and Beforepay Offer 'Send Now, Pay Later' Service to Consumers for International Money Transfers 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 -. How did you navigate those early moments? Reframe blockchain from a threat to an opportunity, by creating a new autonomous unit. . & Publishing, Logistics
Western Union launched its digital banking app in Germany and Romania in Spring 2022, following 11 months of iterative development. The company wanted to improve the digital experiences offered to customers and build new digital bankingproducts to extend its relationship with customers. 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. Meanwhile, innovators like Ant Financial(China) and M-Pesa(Kenya) are leveraging high mobile penetration rates in emerging markets, and are beginning to experiment with cross-border money transfers. 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. Behind those market-shaper practices are the lean tools and behaviors we develop and encourage. And if Western Union doesnt embrace and transform along with those technologies, it will fade away just like the telegraph. Goldfinch Partners is a private equity firm investing in businesses specialising in digital transformation. 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. Does it offer a more seamless customer experience? The network upgrade will pave the way for Econet to deliver 5G connectivity in more . Us, Terms
But theyve been hugely supportive and as weve hit milestones, such as moving significant infrastructure completely to the cloud or achieving significant savings with the Marketing Cloud, we have built that business case. Learn what is a data platform, which encompass a range of elements required to support the data management cycle. Western Union offers digital transactions in 70 countries to move money around the world. . 2023 Snowflake Inc. All Rights Reserved | If youd rather not receive future emails from Snowflake, unsubscribe here or customize your communication preferences, Snowflake for Advertising, Media, & Entertainment, unsubscribe here or customize your communication preferences. Some want to go to a retail store and pay cash. Consumers are less aware that we have transformed ourselves into one of the largest digital money transfer firms in the world, with our digital activity generating well over $400 million revenues in 2017. Western Union can leverage such physical presence to win this new innovative space. Our App has grown to become one of the industrys most widely used international money transfer apps and a Top 20 finance app in the App Store., Not at all. Over the last two years, Singh has been accelerating Western Union's tech plan. We wont bug you too much because thats more work for all of us. We have a lot of great ideas in terms of investments to drive that topline revenue growth, but we needed ways to fund those. Transformation, Cyber
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. Sources for images:Western Union vs. Bitcoin, Bitland,MyWU,Ripple Union. Singh also sees huge potential in the use of blockchain for specific use cases within financial services and payments, for example, helping with the Know Your Customer (KYC) process that is important to stopping money laundering and fraud and eliminating many of the checks that currently hold up cross-border payments. Theyve complemented each other really well and been able to almost mentor each other, as well as building great relationships with the product groups. Theyll be there to help you stay on track or course correct when you have troubles. 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. Pay for your transfer instantly with a debit or credit card** or start a money transfer and complete the payment in cash at a nearby agent location. But Western Union is missing the true potential of blockchain for its business. Entertainment, Professional
- Access cash back rewards at the WU store. All of that is dependent on people in the organization putting resources behind this kind of an agile transformation. Western Union Digital Banking is offered by Western Union International Bank GmbH. These are seismic factors currently redefining our world, earning their own epochal moniker: The Fourth Industrial Revolution. Western Union launched its digital banking app in Germany and Romania in Spring 2022, following 11 months of iterative development. Harare Responsible for . Leading fintech, Mambu, provides the platform and engine that drives the core of Western Union's new digital bank. Ericsson will help accelerate Econet's digital transformation journey. The new generation of customers, especially Millennials, want to find us in the ecosystem of messaging apps.. And the new business model may require a very different RPP (traditional money transfer process vs. transfer via blockchain). UnionDigital Bank is the trusted bridge between innovation and regulation. Consumers can 'Send Now, Pay Later' by borrowing up to AUD 2000 through Beforepay's wage-advance product on Western Union's digital channels. Technology powers the data economy. Talend is our backbone for that work and have really evolved their product to meet our needs.. On May 17, 2018, at the Digital Assembly in Sofia, Bulgaria, the European Commission launched the Digital Agenda for the Western Balkans. & Distribution, Media and
We believe in the work we do, why we do it, and who we hire to get it done. Western Union is also focused on the global remittance market. Jaffin: Our company mission is to enable financial transfers between people anywhere and everywhere; we had a responsibility to continue to deliver on that. There are 13 of these practices, and thats really how were assessing success with the transformation across the organization. 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. [3] Shelly Freierman, Telegram Falls Silent Stop Era Ends Stop, NY Times, Feb. 6, 2006. Others see blockchain as an opportunity to help emerging governments become efficient and transparent, for example, by serving as the official land title registration. From apps that save lives to those that process loans in a
By John Manning, International Banker. Huawei believes digital talent is a key driver in achieving digital transformation, solid economic growth, and better quality of life. You have to recognise that youre taking a massive journey as a company because it has always relied on data centres. Filipino workers abroad), they need to bring physical money somewhere, and most of the fintech companies in remittance space dont have their own channels (they often partner with local kiosks). Before OutSystems, we typically released every six weeks. In 2011, Western Union opened an office in San Francisco to ramp up its digital operation. Swanback said a . Institute, Infosys Innovation
Digital Transformation. The partnership will enable funds to be sent from countries around the world to mobile wallets across Africa through the organization's licensed payment rails. He also praises Snowflakes adaptability when it came to dealing with huge capacity increases. What are the biggest lessons you learned? Guide for Suppliers, Select
There was a need to accelerate the process we wanted to undertake, I have that experience of transformation projects happening on a massive scale. (PDF-165 KB) The transformation of a legacy company whose roots lie in the era of the telegraph involves more than just lean deployments and agile methodologies. This entails a leader or a manager being on the floor with people doing their day-to-day jobs, just observing the way they work. And when that happens, they start to see further opportunities for continuous improvement, leading them to new ideas about things they can do to improve efficiency or effectiveness. Leadership. Having found great success with its Marketing Cloud, Singh outlines his longer-term vision to connect a number of Western Unions central products. [6], However, regulators cant keep pace with the wave of new blockchain applications. In this video, Shelly Swanback, president of product and platform at Western Union, discusses the three key . Everest Group Low-Code Application Development Platforms PEAK Matrix 2022. . The partnership with Talend has evolved over the last few years and was originally established to provide our business and technology teams a fast and efficient way to build data pipelines. This does have privacy implications and hence needs to be vetted out with regulatory authorities around the world. Please enable Javascript to see this feature. [12]Josh Constine, Western Union Brings Money Transfer and Its Tricky Fees to Chat Apps, TechCrunch.com, Feb. 4, 2016. 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. (2017) Monitoring Media Pluralism in Europe: Application of the Media Pluralism Monitor 2016 in the European Union, Montenegro and Turkey. Though its too early for results, the response from consumers has been positive, he says. So well go from maybe four pilot teams to a plan to scale out across 400 people and maybe 30 teams next year. 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. [9]Western Union recently dipped its toes into blockchain. And still others want to do it all online.. 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. Western Union. A large proportion of Western Unions infrastructure has been migrated to the cloud, and Singh reveals a timeline to complete the programme of work. Western Union is doing that. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press The pandemics economic stressors created a situation where more people suddenly needed to send money to family and friends around the world, many of whom rarely use financial services. Sub-Saharan Africa 3G and 4G mobile broadband coverage stands at 86% and 57% of the population, respectively. It works with Talend to streamline data movement in compliance with GDPR across financial, reconciliation, auditing and trading partners. Companies like Venmo(PayPal) and Zelle(joint venture by several large U.S. banks) have deep pockets, but so far are mostly competing in domestic payment markets. Board of Directors. In addition to our digital banking app, there are at least 20 internal employee-facing apps that weve delivered that make work easier and more efficient for our employees., Asked what differences he sees in the development team, Tom says, With OutSystems, weve got a more cohesive and multi-talented development team because were using visual low-code development thats self-documenting. Cloud services such as cloud data platforms have become cost-efficient, high performance calling cards for any business that leverages big data. Jaffin: Digital was critical in a few ways. With OutSystems, we deploy twice every week. How did you evolve for digital convenience and safety? The reason for that is due to the huge increase in demand for our digital services as lockdowns were implemented across many different geographies. In a report on ERP modernization, the global market intelligence firm highlights how Western Digital . Its important to understand that business stakeholders are customers of our data. Best practices were also key. - Earn My WU points. We do that both in-line, so you as a manager go and visit your own organization, but also visit other functions. These initiatives will likely change Western Unions operating model, therefore they must be fully supported by CEO Hikmet Ersek and should occupy most of his time. Policy . Mohua is a marketing leader with over 15 years of experience in building and leading brands across industries. 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.