In just 11 months, we delivered a full-service digital banking experience that expands our relationship with customers.. Us, Terms Western Union. One of our most important tools is the floor walk. They essentially sponsor a team and loan the resources that are necessary. Here is Swamy Sivasubramaniyan, Head of Financial Services and Settlement Platform for Western Union, discussing the digital transformation experience with Infosys and Oracle. And its not something you can achieve really quickly, its a multiple-year process. An undisputed leader in the global payments space, Western Union is driving a company-wide technology transformation, underpinned by migrating its infrastructure from on-prem to the cloud. Please enable Javascript to see this feature. Why Do Companies Choose to Outsource Work? [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. Although retail business declined during . In 2017 SEED supported 20 projects, impacting 5,000 children and youth; we hope to support event more in 2018.. Some want to go to a retail store and pay cash. We go where our customers go, says Khalid Fellahi, senior vice president and general manager for Western Union Digital, based in San Francisco. Technology powers the data economy. 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. [1] The first transcontinental telegraph was sent on October 24, 1861, from the Chief Justice of California to President Abraham Lincoln. One of the benefits that weve really seen as weve gone through these first two years of our journey is what happens when we get everyone speaking the same language. 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. One moment later, in Shimla, a hill country city in India, close to the ridge of the Himalayan foothills, a cashier at the . 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. Blockchain is technology that uses an open, distributed ledger to permanently verify and record transactions between two parties. If any of these should fit what you're looking for, consider exploring a career with Western Union. 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.. Specifically, how Data, Editors note: This is part of a series of blogs about the data economy. The resulting report, How to Win in the Data Economy, includes anecdotes from dozens of customers, analysts, and influencers about how to succeed, all in addition to the survey itself, based on feedback from 1,000 senior business, technology, and data managers across five industries and from all over the world. She also has worked with ad agencies like Ogilvy and McCann. Today, WU.com is available in 40 countries, with mobile apps in 18 of them. Similarly, Western Union's ethos is based on empowering the aspiring populations of the world with accessible financial tools to improve the lives of their loved ones and communities. 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. Others prefer to prepare a transaction online and then go to a retail location to pay cash. 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. Many CEOs are lured into spending too much time on legacy businesses, which dont need CEO oversight. Leadership Team. Jaffin: Our company mission is to enable financial transfers between people anywhere and everywhere; we had a responsibility to continue to deliver on that. Instead, Western Union should fund and fully staff a separate unit that has preferential access to Western Unions resources, but is not restricted by legacy operators within Western Union. Most of the customers for remittance service (e.g. Top-down prioritization of digital transformation. 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. Packaged Goods, Engineering 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. Gartner Magic Quadrant for Low-Code Application Platforms, 2023. We started function by function, looking at individual deployments across our different groups in the company. Achieving that is going to give Western Union agility, stability and resilience and allow us to focus on product development, because we know that our technology is going to sit in the cloud and take up a lot less of our time. Solutions enabled - Oracle Revenue Management and Billing, Oracle Business Intelligence, Infosys Transaction Reconciliation System, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Solution and Services, Infosys Oracle Services, part of Infosys Cobalt. Western Union has innovated before. I have successfully directed virtual teams working on Mastercard integrations, Western Union and MoneyGram. Our research identified 10 attributes of an organizations data infrastructure that enable it to take full advantage of the data economy, the global supply and, Editors note: This is part of a series about the data economy. How would this improve our agility, the need to deliver great digital experiences at scale, and the desire to use low-code across the whole stackfront-end, integration, and back-end core systems., Western Union became an OutSystems customer in November 2020. It requires a change in process and culture, the adoption of a common lingo, executive buy-in, and a center . Over the last two years, Singh has been accelerating Western Union's tech plan. Meridian, Infosys I also agree with you that the competitive advantage of Western Union is a broad network of retail footprint across the world. Mohua is a marketing leader with over 15 years of experience in building and leading brands across industries. In Western and Central Africa, only 36% of the population has access to broadband connectivity. 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. 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. Western Union has had a compound annual growth rate above 25 percent over the past five years, since the launch of the digital division. We have a lot of great ideas in terms of investments to drive that topline revenue growth, but we needed ways to fund those. The pandemic really accelerated the digital transformation journey; the plan was for it to be rolled out in three years but that timeframe became 18 months, Singh tells Digital Bulletin. Ericsson will help accelerate Econet's digital transformation journey. [4] Form 10-K for the year ended December 2017, p.7. 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. [12]Josh Constine, Western Union Brings Money Transfer and Its Tricky Fees to Chat Apps, TechCrunch.com, Feb. 4, 2016. The idea is to orient the company around improving these market-shaper practices, really getting the health of our organization strong, and becoming confident that if we can improve the health of the organization, the financial results will follow. Youre expected to find ways to optimize your processes and drive value. The international roll-out continues to other countries at pace. Experts at TCS and Western Union share the trends that are affecting digital transformation in financial services. It is our responsibility to enable businesses, problem solvers, regulators and communities to leverage fintech for the betterment of lives. Cloud services such as cloud data platforms have become cost-efficient, high performance calling cards for any business that leverages big data. 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. Western Union must adapt to an increasingly mobile world: if Western Union doesnt develop low-cost mobile money transfers, Western Union wont be able to compete with new competitors like Ant Financial and Zelle. As the transformation gets embedded into the organization, the businesses start to run their own agile deployments. arrow_forward. We believe in the work we do, why we do it, and who we hire to get it done. Then think about the products you want to offer and how it can be a data-enabled product, such as being hyper-personalized. Western Union (NYSE: WU), a global leader in cross-border, cross-currency money movement and payments and Zain Cash, the award-winning mobile financia . 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. We recently delivered a similar requirement to a higher standard using one OutSystems developer in just 15 days. 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. Goldfinch Partners is a private equity firm investing in businesses specialising in digital transformation. And on our website, we added new support and wayfinding tools to ensure customers could quickly and easily access information. The pandemic really accelerated the digital transformation journey; the plan was for it to be rolled out in three years but that timeframe became 18 months. Deep divides in digital connectivity, internet use, and access remain. 2021. 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. 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. Western Union is doing that. If CDIOs dont have the right culture on their teams, how can they help drive a data-first culture throughout their organization? Download the Western Union (WU) money transfer app and quickly start sending cash to Mexico and worldwide, 24/7! We caught up with Mazzaferro to dive deeper into how the Data Cloud enables ongoing digital . The digital transformation is helping Western Union emerge from a challenging two-year era. The culture change has to be driven across teams to show how technology has enabled different and better outcomes. . Entertainment, Professional 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. Some development teams suffer 100 percent attrition in two to three years., "OutSystems helps in many ways. The gap between access and use is growing, with 56% of people in . The top challenge for businesses with digital transformation goals in 2023 is determining where their companies should direct spending on technologies, according to a BCG X report. When people send money to friends or family across the country or around the world, chances are good that Western Union is involved. 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. Thats really enabled a lot more collaboration across groups. Learn about JSON storage. Business Unit Represents Approximately 7% of Company Revenue . 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. These are seismic factors currently redefining our world, earning their own epochal moniker: The Fourth Industrial Revolution. While the pace of change has been considerable, the leadership team at Western Union has been focused on implementing a large-scale technology transformation. Lean deployments are a big piece of our overall transformation program. 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. Complete your profile for personalized recommendations, Managing Director, U.S. Financial Services at Google. 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. In Austria our employees have put in place numerous initiatives such as German courses and mentoring programs, and we celebrated in March the first anniversary of SEED, a project supported by the Western Union Foundation in collaboration with the Austrian Ministry of Education and Teach for Austria Alumni Association. These agents typically manage retail stores across the world, and offer Western Union money transfer services in exchange for a commission. Western Union can leverage such physical presence to win this new innovative space. 2023Western Union Holdings, Inc. All Rights Reserved. The Transformation Story of Western Digital. We serve all customer segments: from digital natives who are never without their smartphones to the 4 billion people on earth the World Bank estimates arent online yet., Western Union is strongly committed to migrants and to refugees: migration is at the heart of our business. In the past five years, theres been a leveling across applications and data. Weve been able to increase the amount and frequency of relevant data we can share with our agents, and they have started to build new processes based on that. ; Offering combines Deloitte's ConvergePROSPERITY BankingSuite solution and multiple AWS services. Salesforce has a value proposition that was immediately interesting because it allows you to build a single omnichannel journey that can be managed really efficiently when I want to make a change I only need to do so in one place. Three things were front-of-mind as we evaluated OutSystems, explains Tom Mazzaferro, Chief Data and Innovation Officer at Western Union. . Huawei believes digital talent is a key driver in achieving digital transformation, solid economic growth, and better quality of life. Digital transformation in Western Union must be driven from the top-down. 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). Garden, The Economist How did you navigate those early moments? 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. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Want to learn more about technology and organizations? It has become one of the leaders in Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) technology and the majority of the data moving across our ecosystem is now powered by Talend. SEED aims to improve education and employability of students from low socio-economic backgrounds, especially children of refugees, migrants, and local families. | Learn more about Rokas kudas's work experience, education, connections & more by visiting their profile on . Having got the right people in place, Singh and his team set about building a partner network to supercharge Western Unions technology evolution. Mohua Das Gupta - Head of Marketing, Tata CliQ. Society Updated: 01-06-2022 - 11:45. In this video, Shelly Swanback, president of product and platform at Western Union, discusses the three key . So we had to figure out how to continue to show up for customers while also ensuring everyones health and safely. The CDO needs to drive digital transformation by enabling data to power product development and the company. For decades, Western Union has defended its global position by investing in regulatory compliance. Its important to understand that business stakeholders are customers of our data. ene. Digital transformation in Western Union must be driven from the top-down. We wanted plug-and-play convenience to integrate any technology.. Poland followed later in 2022, while plans are at hand to launch Italy by the end of the year. In the latest step in its digital journey, Western Union recently launched a bot that enables Facebook Messenger users in the United States to send money to more than 200 countries, across 130 currencies, from within the messaging app. Our goal was to build a new Cloud-based IT architecture based on microservicesthat would allow us to integratemany different systems quicklyboth internal and external vendors, explains Tom. The paper analyzes the issues of digital transformation in the European Union in such key dimensions as financing digitalization and implementing public policy to bridge the digital divide in the EU member countries. Revenue from Western Union's digital money transfer services spiked from $600 million in 2019 to over $850 million in 2020. Now that these pilots are winding down, its been easy to get the support across the organization to find the resources necessary to establish teams that can scale it out in different areas across the company. Markets are perpetually shifting and change is unavoidable, but to keep up with those shifting tides companies need to stay focused on digital transformation. With my work with WEF, I was lucky enough to sit around a table recently with some important people and talk about how we can take this forward. 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. Many CEOs are lured into spending too much time on legacy businesses, which don't need CEO oversight. [2] Westar 1, Wikipedia, accessed April 2018. Think of Western Union, and its yellow placard advertising an agent location comes to mind. Digital Bulletin exists to tell the story. [11]See generally Rebecca M. Henderson & Kim B. Clark, Architectural Innovation: The Reconfiguration of Existing Product Technologies and the Failure of Established Firms, Administrative Science Quarterly Vol. Navigating complex land title issues would also leverage Western Unions existing capabilities of dealing with a range of government regulations. Board of Directors. Not just front-end, but back office and our contact center. Before OutSystems, we typically released every six weeks. Customers can send and receive money in a fast, reliable and convenient manner., We are proud to offer the same omnichannel choice in Austria. How did you evolve for digital convenience and safety? 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). The organisation was looking for somebody with a fresh perspective who could challenge the norms, bring people together to show them the value of what were doing and basically create an environment thats a little bit different to your usual corporate set-up. 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. These are things like rewards and recognition, top-down innovation, and consequence management. Cookies help us deliver our services. Leading fintech, Mambu, provides the platform and engine that drives the core of Western Union's new digital bank. By using our services, you agree to our use of cookies. In 2011, Western Union opened an office in San Francisco to ramp up its digital operation. In 2016, Western Union completed 268 million consumer-to-consumer transactions and 523 million business payments world-wide, moving more than $150 billion of principal for consumers and businesses. 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. The reason for that is due to the huge increase in demand for our digital services as lockdowns were implemented across many different geographies. Receive rewards. Western Union also is uniquely positioned to explore blockchain applications in emerging markets by leveraging Western Unions retail footprint, regulatory compliance learning, and global brand. 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. Chief Data and Innovation Officer, Western Union, Enterprise-grade scalability and security, Cloud-based IT architecture based on microservices. . This will enable the company to maintain its high . Navigate Zealand, South Western Union International Banks CEO Peter Bucher firmly believes you can drive successful, innovative business while creating a better world for the community you live in. There were definitely times I was looking at costs and thinking how I was going to explain to finance, or my CFO, he says. 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. Behind those market-shaper practices are the lean tools and behaviors we develop and encourage. Really understand the business stakeholders problem and how you can fix or enable it. Policy . Discover how Santander Consumer Finance replaced 70% of their core IT systems in three years with OutSystems. They have also triggered profound changes within global banking, demanding that lenders remain flexible, nimble, and innovative in their digital-banking strategies to meet customers' rapidly . Recently I talked to him about the companys rapid pivot to digital this past year, his biggest learnings, and what the future holds. 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. Poland followed later in 2022, while plans are at hand to launch Italy by the end of the year. - Access cash back rewards at the WU store. Updated on. It works with Talend to streamline data movement in compliance with GDPR across financial, reconciliation, auditing and trading partners. You have to recognise that youre taking a massive journey as a company because it has always relied on data centres. 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. [11] Western Unions footprint of retail locations gives it a worldwide laboratory for experimenting with blockchain applications. Harare Responsible for . Manufacturing, Information Services Western Union International Bank GmbH is regulated by the Financial Markets Authority in Austria, [i] Agent location count valid as of 31 December 2017. Strategic partnerships working with platforms like Google is a critical piece of that. Mazzaferro: Keep it simple. 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. The transformation of a legacy company whose roots lie in the era of the telegraph involves more than just lean deployments and agile methodologies. 1 (March 1990), pp. What Ive tried to do is look at each of the groups and find out who the strong players in each of them are, the leaders that are vocal and very straightforward in conversation. Commenting on the advantages of development on OutSystems, Tom says, "We estimate that we're getting new products . Open a free Western Union Digital Banking bank account to manage your international finances and make instant, transfer fee-free* money transfers to other Western Union Digital Banking account holders. Thats the high performancewe rely on with OutSystems., Low-Code for Digital Financial Services Delivery. Jaffin: Evolution meant expanding the ways in which customers experience the brand digitally. All of that is dependent on people in the organization putting resources behind this kind of an agile transformation. Contributed to establishing Quality Assurance, Training and Documentation strategy and processes for AML Operations functions. Many of its 150 million customers worldwide depend on money transfers to pay for food, electricity, medication, and other necessities. Knowledge Institute, Chemical Having to maintain two sets of procedures on-prem and cloud for 18 months to ensure business continuity is chief among them, while teams have had to escalate a company-wide transformation during a pandemic. 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. [9]Clayton M. Christensen & Michael E. Raynor,The Innovators Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth (Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 2003), Ch. In the past, JSON storage and analysis required specific JSON databases. Thank you for this great post, Hans. Industry experts were also drafted in to create the army that was required for this technology mission. Increasingly, digital technology and mobile devices play a key role in these transactions. [8]David Thomas, Beyond the Hype: What Blockchain could mean for Africa, African Business Magazine, Feb. 26, 2018. The fusion of the digital and the physical, the irrepressible rise of new technologies. So youre really talking about game-changing differences between how processes worked before and after. Most popular: Free $20 Amazon.com e-gift code for every friend you refer (earn up to $500).