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. Reliable for over 170 years. The development speedand deployment easeprovided by OutSystems accelerates change and feedback cycles, which paves the way for continuous innovation. Society Updated: 01-06-2022 - 11:45. We caught up with Mazzaferro to dive deeper into how the Data Cloud enables ongoing digital transformation at Western Union: Snowflake: Tom, as CDIO you lead the charge on keeping Western Union at the forefront of data economy leadership. If any of these should fit what you're looking for, consider exploring a career with Western Union. 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. If CDIOs dont have the right culture on their teams, how can they help drive a data-first culture throughout their organization? 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. Thats the high performancewe rely on with OutSystems., Low-Code for Digital Financial Services Delivery. The gap between access and use is growing, with 56% of people in . COVID-19 has brought countless challenges, but its also caused us to focus all of our efforts around customers and reground ourselves in our mission. Mazzaferro: In the past, the thinking in the industry has often been that applications are king, and that data flows through the applications. UnionDigital Bank is the trusted bridge between innovation and regulation. of Use, Payment In a report on ERP modernization, the global market intelligence firm highlights how Western Digital . What we are talking about is not cryptocurrency, it is not something that has to be mined. Finance. 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 . It requires a change in process and culture, the adoption of a common lingo, executive buy-in, and a center . For decades, Western Union benefited from network effects as it added density and new geographies. Western Union is a partner of the World Economic Forum (WEF) and is a leading voice in the conversation of how to build a global payments ecosystem, which is stable and where remittances can be made much faster. We built the Western Union Way team, or the WU Way team as we call it, with ten high-potential individuals from around the company. 35, No. Finally, shareholders may punish Western Union for moving away from its higher margin core business to focus instead on simpler, lower-cost digital money transfers. Sources for images:Western Union vs. Bitcoin, Bitland,MyWU,Ripple Union. We use OutSystems in multiple layers of our tech stack, says Tom. 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. your next, Infosys Continue to partner with popular digital platforms to provide legacy C2C money transfer services. Although retail business declined during . 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 . Were there tools or technology that were particularly helpful in your transformation? Technology powers the data economy. Western Union's digital services align with the UAE government's policy to create an economy driven by innovation and technology," said Salma Massoud, head of digital, Middle East and Africa . Then think about the products you want to offer and how it can be a data-enabled product, such as being hyper-personalized. Policy . Western Union can leverage such physical presence to win this new innovative space. Manager of a Team responsible for First Level Support, Event monitoring and Major Incident Management to internal and external clients that affects core processes and clients. Kong, New Security, Infosys 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. The Western Union Way of digital transformation. Entertainment, Professional 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 entails a leader or a manager being on the floor with people doing their day-to-day jobs, just observing the way they work. 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. In the past several years, the Englewood, Colo.-based company has made a point to develop and [] 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. Western Union. Western Union has had a compound annual growth rate above 25 percent over the past five years, since the launch of the digital division. With OutSystems, we deploy twice every week. 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. First, for continuity of services. 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. For example, we began offering an option for telephone money transfer. New-found agility delivers growth and improved Customer Experience for partners and customers. 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. [2] Westar 1, Wikipedia, accessed April 2018. Jaffin: Digital was critical in a few ways. 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. 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. [12]Josh Constine, Western Union Brings Money Transfer and Its Tricky Fees to Chat Apps, TechCrunch.com, Feb. 4, 2016. Teams that may not previously have interacted with each other are now doing floor walks with each other. InsurTech & Crypto projects as the world embraces CX, Business Transformation and Digital . Its been a great combination. 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. Many of its 150 million customers worldwide depend on money transfers to pay for food, electricity, medication, and other necessities. This does have privacy implications and hence needs to be vetted out with regulatory authorities around the world. Mohua is a marketing leader with over 15 years of experience in building and leading brands across industries. They essentially sponsor a team and loan the resources that are necessary. A hugely significant piece of the transformation has come from rethinking how Western Union communicates with its vast customer base. 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. My role was to bring all of these different teams together and instil a culture that recognised it wasnt just about how fast we were going, but also about the quality of the product were delivering.. The reason for that is due to the huge increase in demand for our digital services as lockdowns were implemented across many different geographies. As the figure below shows, five components are needed to execute an organization's digital transformation: 1. Youre now a year into your role as CMO and leading through a prolonged global crisis. . 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. [1] The first transcontinental telegraph was sent on October 24, 1861, from the Chief Justice of California to President Abraham Lincoln. Marketing tactics evolved to attract digital customers, who have a different profile from traditional retail customers. Now data is the driver and applications are being developed to handle that data and represent it to business stakeholders to make it consumable. Safety starts with understanding how developers collect and share your data. Mazzaferro: Technology is a critical part of the equation, of course, but technology can never drive culture change. 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. 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. We will expand our Messenger bot to other countries and add other languages, he adds. Data and insights gave us the ability to make important strategic decisions in the throes of what could have been a panic. Patrick Gauthier, CEO of Convera, formerly known as Western Union Business Solutions. 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. 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. 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. Board of Directors. Part of this agility drive involved Western Union migrating its legacy on-prem IT infrastructure to the Cloud. Created: 05-05-2021 - 17:15. [1] One hundred years later, Western Union launched the first domestic commercial geostationary satellite (Westar 1). 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. 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). Enterprise Technology Operations Center Manager. The way we approached it was to use the central WU Way team for capability building. Mazzaferro: Snowflake is enabling quite a bit around analytics, reporting, event triggers, and settlement across our card providers. As an iconic brand for over 150 years, Western Union is constantly striving to innovate for their customers. By using our services, you agree to our use of cookies. 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. So we established a set of what we call market-shaper practices that we wanted to focus on. Three things were front-of-mind as we evaluated OutSystems, explains Tom Mazzaferro, Chief Data and Innovation Officer at Western Union. It took six months to do the bare minimum. And if Western Union doesnt embrace and transform along with those technologies, it will fade away just like the telegraph. Jaffin: Evolution meant expanding the ways in which customers experience the brand digitally. Western Union launched its digital banking app in Germany and Romania in Spring 2022, following 11 months of iterative development. Western Union has innovated before. Institute, Infosys Innovation 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. It is our responsibility to enable businesses, problem solvers, regulators and communities to leverage fintech for the betterment of lives. Now we are on track to achieve those gains and benefits that come with being more agile and being able to grow at scale, we can really begin to look forward and reap the rewards of the transformation.. Mohua Das Gupta - Head of Marketing, Tata CliQ. By John Manning, International Banker. Does it offer a more seamless customer experience? The Foundation is supported by the Western Union Company, its employees, Agents, and business partners, working to support education and disaster relief efforts as pathways toward a better future. Western Union Uses AWS to Create Company-Wide Digital Transformation. To ensure those approaches were safe and secure, we partnered with governmental organizations to find new and secure ways to verify customers. We offer consumers the choices they want, both for sending and receiving money, he stresses. 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. Manufacturing, Information Services Youre expected to come up with new ways of innovation to drive revenue growth across the organization. Over the last two years, Singh has been accelerating Western Union's tech plan. Goldfinch Partners is a private equity firm investing in businesses specialising in digital transformation. 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. Thats really enabled a lot more collaboration across groups. We have a lot of great ideas in terms of investments to drive that topline revenue growth, but we needed ways to fund those. 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. Western Union has gained a comprehensive view of the customer while running the Data Cloud on AWS. 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. 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. [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. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Want to learn more about technology and organizations? 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). 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. Western Union is renowned for its unparalleled international network, with over 500,000 agent locations spanning 200 countries and territories. We embrace the white canvas and first principles design, breaking away from legacy systems to create smart . Digital transformation in the EU. Services, Public We believe in the work we do, why we do it, and who we hire to get it done. Not satisfied with the idea of incremental change, the company took a start-from-scratch approach, assembling an experienced team and transforming its infrastructure. 1 (March 1990), pp. 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 . & Publishing, Logistics Beyond the public health crisis, COVID-19 has had a devastating impact on personal finances, causing poverty levels and inequality to rise globally. 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 The network upgrade will pave the way for Econet to deliver 5G connectivity in more . Join us to learn how your organization can become a leader in the Data Economy and the business benefits that result. He reveals that Western Union was using multiple companies for each of its email, in-app and SMS communication channels. Its created a need for financial sector brands to step up and help by democratizing access to their services via mobile phones. 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. So youre really talking about game-changing differences between how processes worked before and after. Discover the latest data, insights, and inspiration from Think with Google. 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. Reflecting on the transformation to-date, Singh is clear that it hasnt come without its challenges. 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. As we get the pilots completed, the idea is to turn the WU Way team into more of a center of excellence. That system is fine in a cash based economy, but is becoming increasingly cumbersome as digital payments take hold in emerging markets. 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.
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