Unless they can feasibly use technology to improve their cost structure, Im super bearish on Western Union. 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. During its February 2018 earnings call, CEO Hikmet Ersek announced that Western Union is experimenting with Ripple for settling transactions and for capital optimization, and is also testing Ripples native currency (XRP).[10]. With OutSystems, we deploy twice every week. 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. Western Union powers your pursuit. Procurement & Construction, Financial 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). 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 . Others prefer to prepare a transaction online and then go to a retail location to pay cash. Cortex, Infosys Its in our DNA to think about global operations because Western Union covers the world.. Dan Nordlander is senior vice president of Western Union Way Operations at Western Union, and Barr Seitz is senior manager of editorial and digital communications in McKinseys New York office. Governments pay close attention to cross-border money transfers, and heavily regulate these services to prevent fraud, tax evasion, and other criminal activities. 28+ active Western Union coupons, discount codes & coupon codes for June 2021. Top-down prioritization of digital transformation. I have successfully directed virtual teams working on Mastercard integrations, Western Union and MoneyGram. 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. It is far more stable than that and can be used for near instant settlements across the board, while providing liquidity to Reserve Banks. Society Updated: 01-06-2022 - 11:45. 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. To learn more about the data economy, what your organization stands to gain from using data effectively, and how to become a Data Economy Leader, download the report overview, How to Win in Todays Data Economy. By John Manning, International Banker. 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. We go where our customers go, says Khalid Fellahi, senior vice president and general manager for Western Union Digital, based in San Francisco. We recently delivered a similar requirement to a higher standard using one OutSystems developer in just 15 days. In 2011, Western Union opened an office in San Francisco to ramp up its digital operation. 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.. Western Unions platform provides seamless cross-border flows and its leading global financial network bridges more than 200 countries and territories and over 130 currencies and 500K partner networks. Top retailers use AI-powered campaigns to engage their most valuable customers. The Baupost Group is a $31 billion Boston-based investment firm. (2017) Monitoring Media Pluralism in Europe: Application of the Media Pluralism Monitor 2016 in the European Union, Montenegro and Turkey. You have to recognise that youre taking a massive journey as a company because it has always relied on data centres. [7]While cryptocurrencies are an obvious threat to Western Unions cross-border money transfers, Blockchain also can be used in a range of imaginative ways. 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. 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 its global financial network, as well as a global online presence. Deep divides in digital connectivity, internet use, and access remain. The aim of this paper is to sketch a brief history of complex digital transformation of media and . In the past, JSON storage and analysis required specific JSON databases. Over the last two years, Singh has been accelerating Western Union's tech plan. Business Unit Represents Approximately 7% of Company Revenue Divestiture Will Support Western Union's Strategic Focus on its Global Cross-Border Payments Platform and Digital Capabilities The Western Union Company (NYSE: WU), a global leader in cross-border, cross-currency money movement and payments, together with Goldfinch Partners, LLC ("Goldfinch"), a private equity firm investing in . Talend is our backbone for that work and have really evolved their product to meet our needs.. 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. But you say its about more than technology? How did you navigate those early moments? Meeting the moment with solutions required Western Union to accelerate its own digital transformation. - Earn My WU points. Garden, The Economist Experts at TCS and Western Union share the trends that are affecting digital transformation in financial services. Funds can be picked up in cash at half a million Western Union agent locations worldwide or transferred electronically to the recipients bank account or to a debit card linked to a digital wallet. Automation reduces development toil, were more productive, so we dont need so many developers, and we dont end up with orphaned code when developers leave. Sector, Travel and Most of the customers for remittance service (e.g. We wont bug you too much because thats more work for all of us. Transformation, Cyber 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. But it becomes more self-driven, and that really enables the scale. Industry experts were also drafted in to create the army that was required for this technology mission. Western Union also opened franchise stores, which offer money transfer services as well as onsite currency exchanges. Technology, Industrial 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. 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. Something that is ripe for discussion among many of these discussion groups is the idea of a digital dollar, which could be made transferable all around the world with vendors and partners.. 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. 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. That system is fine in a cash based economy, but is becoming increasingly cumbersome as digital payments take hold in emerging markets. Most popular: Free $20 Amazon.com e-gift code for every friend you refer (earn up to $500). . Business Application Services, Service Experience 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. & Distribution, Media and Western Union is doing that. The gap between access and use is growing, with 56% of people in . 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). Poland followed later in 2022, while plans are at hand to launch Italy by the end of the year. DENVER-(BUSINESS WIRE)-The Western Union Company (NYSE: WU), a global leader in cross-border, cross-currency money movement and payments, today announced that the Company has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire a minority stake in fast growing Saudi Digital Payments Company, or stc pay, a fully owned subsidiary of Saudi Telecom Company. NICE have announced Western Union, a global leader in cross-border, cross-currency money movement, has advanced customer experience through improved . In the past five years, theres been a leveling across applications and data. As the transformation gets embedded into the organization, the businesses start to run their own agile deployments. 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. These agents typically manage retail stores across the world, and offer Western Union money transfer services in exchange for a commission. Microservices, Digital Process Sources for images:Western Union vs. Bitcoin, Bitland,MyWU,Ripple Union. Having got the right people in place, Singh and his team set about building a partner network to supercharge Western Unions technology evolution. 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. Over the last two years, Singh has been accelerating Western Union's tech plan. 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. Its important to understand that business stakeholders are customers of our data. We teach employees, and then they execute. Policy . Western Unions typical customers are migrants seeking a better life not just for themselves, but for their families back home who rely on fund transfers to meet basic needs. Cloud services such as cloud data platforms have become cost-efficient, high performance calling cards for any business that leverages big data. 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. Western Union has innovated before. Big data has helped Western Union merge data across multiple channels for years, for marketing and promotion, customer lifecycle management, compliance and fraud modeling. 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. We believe in the work we do, why we do it, and who we hire to get it done. Western Union International Bank's CEO Peter Bucher firmly believes you can drive successful, innovative business while creating a better world for the community you live in. Western Union's Customer Journey Digital Transformation Fueled by NICE - Innovative NICE Nexidia Customer Journey Optimisation provides powerful analytics to enhance customer experience. And being with the people that are actually doing the work really helps the management get a better sense of where they can use their leadership and influence to make that process easier for the employee and better for the customer. Western Union now has more than 550,000 agent locations in more than 200 countries. [5]. Before OutSystems, we typically released every six weeks. And the new business model may require a very different RPP (traditional money transfer process vs. transfer via blockchain). [9]Clayton M. Christensen & Michael E. Raynor,The Innovators Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth (Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 2003), Ch. Recently I talked to him about the companys rapid pivot to digital this past year, his biggest learnings, and what the future holds. Western Union has gained a comprehensive view of the customer while running the Data Cloud on AWS. Mazzaferro: In the past, the thinking in the industry has often been that applications are king, and that data flows through the applications. The pilots help get buy-in across the organization, and then once we have that buy-in, it provides the resources necessary to scale. Talends technology was used to bring various sources of data from different locations into a single place in rapid fashion, helping make decisions such as waiving fees for those sending funds to people caught up in the explosion. Not satisfied with the idea of incremental change, the company took a start-from-scratch approach, assembling an experienced team and transforming its infrastructure. Western Union Uses AWS to Create Company-Wide Digital Transformation. 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. Watch this tech inequality series featuring scholars, practitioners, & activists, Sign up for the Digital Initiative Newsletter. Furthermore, a chain of retail outlets is expensive. Markets are perpetually shifting and change is unavoidable, but to keep up with those shifting tides companies need to stay focused on digital transformation. Every year or two we rescore ourselves in a company-wide exercise to see where were making progress and where were falling behind. your next, Infosys 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. Commenting on the advantages of development on OutSystems, Tom says, We estimate that were getting new products to market at least twice as fast as competitors, and were probably using a tenth of the resources they are on front-end development. HELIX, Management 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. One of our most important tools is the floor walk. Key takeaways. Learn about JSON storage. Its created a need for financial sector brands to step up and help by democratizing access to their services via mobile phones. When people send money to friends or family across the country or around the world, chances are good that Western Union is involved. Western Union could use existing retail outlets as nodes on a land register blockchain, which could bring in new sources of revenue to those retail stores. If you are a new customer: now you can transfer your FIRST money transfer for FREE*. arrow_forward. Snowflake: What are a few highlights of how Snowflake is helping with digital transformation? The strategy is also to reduce costs; on-prem infrastructure and people running it is expensive and you need back-ups of everything, especially in financial services. Harare Responsible for . Snowflake worked with Longitude to assess what it takes to lead in the data economy. [5] 2017 Annual ReportCEO Letter (noting Western Union has expanded its fund payout network to billions of bank accounts). Jaffin: Evolution meant expanding the ways in which customers experience the brand digitally. How Your Small Business Can Be Managed With The Right Databases, Why Businesses Must Focus on Introducing Technology in the Workplace. ", Tom adds, In fast-moving customer-facing scenarios, development is never build-once-and-doneyoure always iterating to refine the customer experience. He also praises Snowflakes adaptability when it came to dealing with huge capacity increases. Business Unit Represents Approximately 7% of Company Revenue . Secure, touchless, digital money transfers were a safe, reliable way for people to send funds where they needed to, so we leaned in there. Part of this agility drive involved Western Union migrating its legacy on-prem IT infrastructure to the Cloud. Arab Emirates. We started function by function, looking at individual deployments across our different groups in the company. 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. Fellahi sees the Messenger bot as a promising tool. [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. Everest Group Low-Code Application Development Platforms PEAK Matrix 2022. [3] Shelly Freierman, Telegram Falls Silent Stop Era Ends Stop, NY Times, Feb. 6, 2006. Korea, United With the blockchain environment, there may be value in the technology as it becomes more mature and efficient. Updated on. 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. 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. A hugely significant piece of the transformation has come from rethinking how Western Union communicates with its vast customer base. Heres how, Customers want control over their data and wont hesitate to switch brands to get it, Global Insights Briefing: Holiday takeaways for marketers, From solar panels to spa days, see how 2022s top searches set the stage for 2023. Singh estimates that the project has reduced how much it spends on talking to its customers by a quarter, while markedly improving this critical function. Western Union's platform provides seamless cross-border flows and its leading global financial network bridges more than 200 countries and territories and over 130 currencies . The central transformation team helps do the capability building in training those resources up, and then they run their own scaled-out deployment. That created a need to act. Looking back at the results of our work over the last couple of years across all of our deployments, you see some really impressive gains. Meanwhile, new fintech players like Transferwise are able to offer cash transfer services for a fraction of the price since their operations are 100% online. My mission is to empower people to become economically self-reliant. 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. 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. Teams that may not previously have interacted with each other are now doing floor walks with each other. 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. 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. They essentially sponsor a team and loan the resources that are necessary. Mohua is a marketing leader with over 15 years of experience in building and leading brands across industries. 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. 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. Data privacy and security practices . There are 13 of these practices, and thats really how were assessing success with the transformation across the organization. Manufacturing, Information Services 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. Cole heads the 169-year-old company's digital transformation efforts, including the design and development of the software powering those consumer-facing platforms. The international roll-out continues to other countries at pace. It is our responsibility to enable businesses, problem solvers, regulators and communities to leverage fintech for the betterment of lives. Hospitality, Waste Reliable for over 170 years. 1 (March 1990), pp. Today, our omnichannel platform places Western Union in a unique position where our physical network and our digital efforts combine to provide customers with a host of options to transfer money, whether in cash, card into billions of bank accounts, online, using our App or one of our 17 mobile wallet partners. 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. Analytics, API Economy & Many CEOs are lured into spending too much time on legacy businesses, which don't need CEO oversight. Digital transformation can refer to anything from IT modernization (for example, cloud computing), to digital optimization, to the invention of new digital business models. 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. Western Union built its platform by assembling a global network of third party agents. 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 -. 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. ene. 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. - Access cash back rewards at the WU store. We use OutSystems in multiple layers of our tech stack, says Tom. The culture change has to be driven across teams to show how technology has enabled different and better outcomes. If Western Union tries to grow its blockchain capabilities within current operations, internal resistors may directly or indirectly sabotage the initiatives. 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. [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. Today, WU.com is available in 40 countries, with mobile apps in 18 of them. Western Union began a mission to transform the settlement platform with streamlined retail and digital cross-border money transfer operations to overcome the challenges and constraints of their legacy settlement systems. Snowflake enables us to centralize our data and enable application and business processes to leverage it across the organization. Recipients can choose to pick up the sent money at a Western Union location, or send the money to a digital wallet or bank account. Technology or Operations transformation . As we get the pilots completed, the idea is to turn the WU Way team into more of a center of excellence. Youre expected to come up with new ways of innovation to drive revenue growth across the organization. Created: 05-05-2021 - 17:15. Discover how Santander Consumer Finance replaced 70% of their core IT systems in three years with OutSystems. Improvements that we made to our apps digital customer experience, for example, helped it become one of the most downloaded apps among our peer set in 2020. Western Union's stock price continued to climb the week of April 12 reaching $25.89, compared to a low of $21.66 in January.