. Western Union is renowned for its unparalleled international network, with over 500,000 agent locations spanning 200 countries and territories. Though its too early for results, the response from consumers has been positive, he says. Dr. Hosam AbouElDahab on LinkedIn: Western Union and Beforepay Offer Others prefer to prepare a transaction online and then go to a retail location to pay cash. Safety starts with understanding how developers collect and share your data. Its been a great combination. ", Looking back to why Western Union chose OutSystems, Tom says, We serve millions of customers in over 200 countries and territories, and we want to give them the best possible customer experience. How do you start there and end up with a fully embedded transformation across a company of 12,000 people? Lean deployments are a big piece of our overall transformation program. Learn what is a data platform, which encompass a range of elements required to support the data management cycle. Western Union Announces Agreement to Sell Western Union Business Western Union Embraces Digital Transformation - BaselineMag.com 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. Here are 4 steps they follow, Why durable solutions are needed to build the future of audiences, A data-privacy team can support your privacy transformation. Korea, United
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. 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. We have a lot of great ideas in terms of investments to drive that topline revenue growth, but we needed ways to fund those. Its important to understand that business stakeholders are customers of our data. Board of Directors. Snowflake worked with Longitude to assess what it takes to lead in the data economy. 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. Increasingly, digital technology and mobile devices play a key role in these transactions. Africa, South
Arab Emirates. 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. Western Union Advances Its Digital Growth Strategy With Investment in of Use, Payment
Our leadership team remains true to our vision and values, putting customers' evolving needs at the center of our innovation and holding up trust and convenience as the hallmarks of our business. From the earliest days of the pandemic, innovating the companys services to meet new patterns of consumer demand was an urgent matter. Think of Western Union, and its yellow placard advertising an agent location comes to mind. They tend to be younger, they live online and they prefer to do everything there, at the touch of a button, Fellahi observes. Customers can send and receive money in a fast, reliable and convenient manner., We are proud to offer the same omnichannel choice in Austria. Western Union launched its digital banking app in Germany and Romania in Spring 2022, following 11 months of iterative development. Western Union Customer Journey Transformation Jaffin: We engaged with tech partners like Google almost immediately to refine our go-to-market strategy. Industry experts were also drafted in to create the army that was required for this technology mission. Digital transformation in the EU. This will enable the company to maintain its high . ene. Mohua Das Gupta - Head of Marketing, Tata CliQ. 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. It works with Talend to streamline data movement in compliance with GDPR across financial, reconciliation, auditing and trading partners. I have successfully directed virtual teams working on Mastercard integrations, Western Union and MoneyGram. Over the last two years, Singh has been accelerating Western Union's tech plan. Hiring experienced developers was already hard, and the skills drought got even worse with the great resignation. Guide for Suppliers, Select
Its time to align your banks digital transformation strategy with the entire customer lifecycle by providing a personalized omnichannel experience. 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. 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. 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 created a need for financial sector brands to step up and help by democratizing access to their services via mobile phones. Here is Swamy Sivasubramaniyan, Head of Financial Services and Settlement Platform for Western Union, discussing the digital transformation experience with Infosys and Oracle. Group, Infosys Revenue Management Platform for Banking, About
Snowflake enables us to centralize our data and enable application and business processes to leverage it across the organization. My mission is to empower people to become economically self-reliant. But new innovators are highlighting a problem for Western Union: multi-homing is high with money transfers. Western Union. So we established a set of what we call market-shaper practices that we wanted to focus on. As we get the pilots completed, the idea is to turn the WU Way team into more of a center of excellence. Prior to implementing Snowflake in 2021, Western Unions data spanned 34 on-premises data warehouses, resulting in latency and operational burdens. Wingspan, Infosys
Most popular: Free $20 Amazon.com e-gift code for every friend you refer (earn up to $500). Western Union operates in the increasingly competitive, rapidly changing payments sector, where new fintech players are changing how the market operates. Finance. The executive team has done a great job of making it really clear across the company that this is something thats expected of you. 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. 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. For example, in 2016 Western Union integrated money transfer options with messanging apps WeChat and Viber, allowing users to send small amounts of money through the apps. Western Union charges high fees since they need to cover rent and labor overhead. [9]Clayton M. Christensen & Michael E. Raynor,The Innovators Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth (Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 2003), Ch. 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 We do that both in-line, so you as a manager go and visit your own organization, but also visit other functions. [11] Western Unions footprint of retail locations gives it a worldwide laboratory for experimenting with blockchain applications. As the transformation gets embedded into the organization, the businesses start to run their own agile deployments. Western Union Partners With MFS Africa to Enable Money Transfers Into [9]Western Union recently dipped its toes into blockchain. The aim of this paper is to sketch a brief history of complex digital transformation of media and . While the pace of change has been considerable, the leadership team at Western Union has been focused on implementing a large-scale technology transformation. Unless they can feasibly use technology to improve their cost structure, Im super bearish on Western Union. As a company, Western Union is in the middle of a transformational moment. Please enable Javascript to see this feature. Thank you for this great post, Hans. Digital Transformation. Transfers can be delivered in cash or into a digital wallet or a bank account via electronic funds transfer. Garden, The Economist
Really understand the business stakeholders problem and how you can fix or enable it. Our technology platform is founded on a Hadoop big data technology cluster that is used for conversion analysis, risk statistical modeling, payments and risk data processing, Fellahi explains. 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 . Rapid growth in technology was making it easy for international money transfers to take place online, Fellahi recalls. 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. 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. Data quality is so important to us, we need to know who we are marketing to and that means our data has to be of the highest quality.. (2017) Monitoring Media Pluralism in Europe: Application of the Media Pluralism Monitor 2016 in the European Union, Montenegro and Turkey. Complete your profile for personalized recommendations, Managing Director, U.S. Financial Services at Google. 12. 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 recently partnered with other digital platforms to expand its digital offerings. Part of this agility drive involved Western Union migrating its legacy on-prem IT infrastructure to the Cloud. And that could be at an operation site or it could be more of a frontline thing like a sales executive. As the figure below shows, five components are needed to execute an organization's digital transformation: 1. How Your Small Business Can Be Managed With The Right Databases, Why Businesses Must Focus on Introducing Technology in the Workplace. Experience in leading digital products from either the financial services, payment, or fintech industries. So well go from maybe four pilot teams to a plan to scale out across 400 people and maybe 30 teams next year. Singh describes the team he assembled as being super-powerful, and says he often refers to it as his three-in-box strategy, owing to the various areas for which he recruited. 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. And on our website, we added new support and wayfinding tools to ensure customers could quickly and easily access information. Society Updated: 01-06-2022 - 11:45. Navigating complex land title issues would also leverage Western Unions existing capabilities of dealing with a range of government regulations. 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. few clicks, you can use OutSystems to bring your visions to life. Strategic partnerships working with platforms like Google is a critical piece of that. 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). 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. Sources for images:Western Union vs. Bitcoin, Bitland,MyWU,Ripple Union. 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. Western Union uses a central team to build new capabilities across the business. Western Union's cross-functional tech teams pushed out expanded digital options and real-time visibility on the status of its retail locations worldwide. So we had to figure out how to continue to show up for customers while also ensuring everyones health and safely. The service, which is set to launch in Madagascar, will see funds from around the world move through payment rails operated by MFS Africa, the continent's largest payment gateway.. MFS Africa's digital payments network connects more than 400 million mobile money wallets, more than 200 million bank accounts across Africa, and more than 200,000 agents in Nigeria, to enable cross-platform and . The Western Union Company (WU) Q3 2022 Earnings Call Transcript Profiles, Infosys Knowledge
Snowflake: What do you see changing now that your organization is better able to share data? Some development teams suffer 100 percent attrition in two to three years., "OutSystems helps in many ways. Western Union has had a compound annual growth rate above 25 percent over the past five years, since the launch of the digital division. Not just front-end, but back office and our contact center. We started function by function, looking at individual deployments across our different groups in the company. These strategies are paying off. Western Union and Beforepay introduce 'send now, pay later' serviceWestern Union Announces Agreement to Sell Western Union Business The Western Union Way of digital transformation | McKinsey Its more about having the manager understand how the work actually gets done on the floor. We continue to experiment with the technology and time will tell if it offers a better alternative to traditional rails.. Its one of the most widely used platforms from a data perspective and were expanding our relationship with Talend to start using some of its data quality products as well. . Not satisfied with the idea of incremental change, the company took a start-from-scratch approach, assembling an experienced team and transforming its infrastructure. Mazzaferro: Technology is a critical part of the equation, of course, but technology can never drive culture change. Thats really enabled a lot more collaboration across groups. Kong, New
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. Driving Western Union's tech transformation - Digital Bulletin 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. How did you evolve for digital convenience and safety? Leadership. We teach employees, and then they execute. The author approaches the problem using public. Digital transformation of journalism and media in Serbia: What has gone In this video, Shelly Swanback, president of product and platform at Western Union, discusses the three key . Western Union digital integrates UAE Pass - Gulf Business (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. Its an ecosystem of complementary platforms that enable a seamless, single customer experience I think thats such a powerful proposition.. Reframe blockchain from a threat to an opportunity, by creating a new autonomous unit. So its a real imperative across the top of the organization. This seems to be a typical BSSE case in which it is hard for the incumbent to disrupt its business, since the innovation may threaten the current profitable business. Western Union has gained a comprehensive view of the customer while running the Data Cloud on AWS. Western Union's digital transformation efforts may fail to drive earnings growth, but they may be enough to keep earnings steady going forward. 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 . [3] Shelly Freierman, Telegram Falls Silent Stop Era Ends Stop, NY Times, Feb. 6, 2006. 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. today more than 65% of Western Union's digital transactions originate on a mobile . The way we approached it was to use the central WU Way team for capability building. Convera's Next Steps: Western Union Business Solutions - Forbes If Western Union tries to grow its blockchain capabilities within current operations, internal resistors may directly or indirectly sabotage the initiatives. Big data has helped Western Union merge data across multiple channels for years, for marketing and promotion, customer lifecycle management, compliance and fraud modeling. Created: 05-05-2021 - 17:15. Western Union's Customer Journey Digital Transformation Fueled by NICE In the past several years, the Englewood, Colo.-based company has made a point to develop and [] 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. It requires a change in process and culture, the adoption of a common lingo, executive buy-in, and a center . We will expand our Messenger bot to other countries and add other languages, he adds. The Western Union Way of digital transformation. UnionDigital Bank is the trusted bridge between innovation and regulation. We embrace the white canvas and first principles design, breaking away from legacy systems to create smart . Western Union. He shares his views on digital transformation and economic opportunities for all. . Snowflake: What are a few highlights of how Snowflake is helping with digital transformation? This aims to support the transition of the region into a digital economy and bring the benefits of digital transformation, such as faster economic growth, more jobs, and better services. The gap between access and use is growing, with 56% of people in . The role of CDO needs to encompass more than data management and data governance, more than even enabling the pipeline and managing the environments. Download the Western Union (WU) money transfer app and quickly start sending cash to Mexico and worldwide, 24/7! The Western Union Company - Western Union Fintech Expansion: Opens New 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. Some changes that used to take a month, we now deliver in around 48 hours.. Becoming digital first meant we needed to deliver fast, frictionless experiences, especially on mobile. To address this new competitive landscape, Western Union sought an agility boost to accelerate innovation. 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.. A doctor in London taps an app on her phone to transfer 500 pounds. Today, structured and semi-structured data can easily coincide. 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. 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. Western Union (NYSE: WU), a global leader in cross-border, cross-currency money movement and payments and Zain Cash, the award-winning mobile financia . For decades, Western Union benefited from network effects as it added density and new geographies. From apps that save lives to those that process loans in a
[12]Josh Constine, Western Union Brings Money Transfer and Its Tricky Fees to Chat Apps, TechCrunch.com, Feb. 4, 2016. There was a need to accelerate the process we wanted to undertake, I have that experience of transformation projects happening on a massive scale. 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. Jaffin: Our company mission is to enable financial transfers between people anywhere and everywhere; we had a responsibility to continue to deliver on that. New-found agility delivers growth and improved Customer Experience for partners and customers. 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. 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. Digital Summit WB6 - Prishtina 2022 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. It took six months to do the bare minimum. The OutSystems platforms capabilities were immediately put to the test through 2021, as Western Union and its system integrator started development of its new digital banking app that includes a multicurrency bank account combined with money transfers, and other added benefits such as a Visa Platinum debit card. Others see blockchain as an opportunity to help emerging governments become efficient and transparent, for example, by serving as the official land title registration. 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.
