western union digital transformation

Mazzaferro: Keep it simple. Jay Jaffin was just starting his role as Western Union's chief marketing officer when the pandemic arrived. 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. And the new business model may require a very different RPP (traditional money transfer process vs. transfer via blockchain). ; With the solution, Western Union launched a state-of-the-art digital . In 2011, Western Union opened an office in San Francisco to ramp up its digital operation. Western Union's digital transformation efforts may fail to drive earnings growth, but they may be enough to keep earnings steady going forward. That allowed us to go from ten people to about 50 change agents in the first wave, which will be able to support 2,500 employees and 4,000 vendor full-time employees within two years. 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. Most popular: Free $20 Amazon.com e-gift code for every friend you refer (earn up to $500). Many CEOs are lured into spending too much time on legacy businesses, which don't need CEO oversight. Provide value consistently every month and deliver new value and capabilities. Part of this agility drive involved Western Union migrating its legacy on-prem IT infrastructure to the Cloud. . Jaffin: Western Union has a culture of innovating to meet customer needs, and the past 12 months have shown us that quick pivots can drive lasting change. Garden, The Economist 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. Engaged in problem resolution of complex . 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. 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. The executive team has done a great job of making it really clear across the company that this is something thats expected of you. 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. Board of Directors. The network upgrade will pave the way for Econet to deliver 5G connectivity in more . 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. Experience in leading digital products from either the financial services, payment, or fintech industries. Rapid iteration is a crucial capability for Western Union, especially when designing customer experiencesin over 200 countries with local customer and regulatory requirements. today more than 65% of Western Union's digital transactions originate on a mobile . Heute nutzen bereits rund 150.000 Anwender in Deutschland sowie in Rumnien, Polen und Italien die Western Union Digital Banking App fr ihre finanziellen Angelegenheiten - immer mit dem Ziel . 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. The gap between access and use is growing, with 56% of people in . How Your Small Business Can Be Managed With The Right Databases, Why Businesses Must Focus on Introducing Technology in the Workplace. We're making content recommendations better for thousands of readers. 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. I also agree with you that the competitive advantage of Western Union is a broad network of retail footprint across the world. . A large proportion of Western Unions infrastructure has been migrated to the cloud, and Singh reveals a timeline to complete the programme of work. Download the Western Union (WU) money transfer app and quickly start sending cash to Mexico and worldwide, 24/7! 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. Once a customer notarises their documents, they can be stored in a safe location and distributed across the blockchain network, so any regulatory authority or government can access that information. Its in our DNA to think about global operations because Western Union covers the world.. Group, Infosys Revenue Management Platform for Banking, About We will expand our Messenger bot to other countries and add other languages, he adds. 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. Second, we increased our use of digital media to reach customers and build a feedback loop. That support has made it a lot easier to have the influence we need to make the transformation successful. Analytics, API Economy & Digital transformation in the EUBenefitting people, the economy and the environment. 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.. Youre expected to find ways to optimize your processes and drive value. Think of Western Union, and its yellow placard advertising an agent location comes to mind. With a strong base of over 4 million customers and an established regional brand in the fast-growing digital wallet market, Western Union believes that stc pay is poised to experience strong growth in the future. ; Offering combines Deloitte's ConvergePROSPERITY BankingSuite solution and multiple AWS services. Arab Emirates. It requires a change in process and culture, the adoption of a common lingo, executive buy-in, and a center of excellence to ensure enterprise-wide success. 1 (March 1990), pp. Western Union has innovated before. 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. Reframe blockchain from a threat to an opportunity, by creating a new autonomous unit. Cole heads the 169-year-old company's digital transformation efforts, including the design and development of the software powering those consumer-facing platforms. - Earn My WU points. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press . Jaffin: Evolution meant expanding the ways in which customers experience the brand digitally. Leading fintech, Mambu, provides the platform and engine that drives the core of Western Union's new digital bank. 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. 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. Thats really enabled a lot more collaboration across groups. 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. He reveals that Western Union was using multiple companies for each of its email, in-app and SMS communication channels. A lot of our big data environment is still on-prem and the mission is to move that completely to the cloud by the end of the year. With 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. . In 1861 it sent the first transcontinental telegraph. Digital transformation can refer to anything from IT modernization (for example, cloud computing), to digital optimization, to the invention of new digital business models. Discover how Santander Consumer Finance replaced 70% of their core IT systems in three years with OutSystems. 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 . Increasingly, digital technology and mobile devices play a key role in these transactions. of Use, Payment Created: 05-05-2021 - 17:15. Network (IIN), Diversity Equity 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 . Contributed to establishing Quality Assurance, Training and Documentation strategy and processes for AML Operations functions. Lean deployments are a big piece of our overall transformation program. Thats the high performancewe rely on with OutSystems., Low-Code for Digital Financial Services Delivery. Ericsson will help accelerate Econet's digital transformation journey. If CDIOs dont have the right culture on their teams, how can they help drive a data-first culture throughout their organization? 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.. The Western Union Foundation is actively supporting NGOs that help refugees and migrants around the globe through education and financial literacy. Digital transformation in Western Union must be driven from the top-down. Society Updated: 01-06-2022 - 11:45. Each quarter our research team identifies on-prem and cloud applications that are being used by the 11000 Western Union employees from the public (Press Releases, Customer References . One trend that has emerged as a result is the growing role of digital money transfers among people who may not otherwise use those services. The CDO needs to drive digital transformation by enabling data to power product development and the company. In the same way that they say it takes a whole village to raise a child, it takes an army of people with the right skillsets and approaches to undertake a challenge like this. In this video, Shelly Swanback, president of product and platform at Western Union, discusses the three key . 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. 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). Chief Data and Innovation Officer, Western Union, Enterprise-grade scalability and security, Cloud-based IT architecture based on microservices. The role of CDO needs to encompass more than data management and data governance, more than even enabling the pipeline and managing the environments. Digital transformation in Western Union must be driven from the top-down. Continue to partner with popular digital platforms to provide legacy C2C money transfer services. Thank you for this great post, Hans. Today customers can commence their journey on our mobile App, pay for their transaction digitally or opt to pay cash from any of our participating Western Union retail locations, use wu.com or go directly to any of the 1,200 agent locations or Western Union-owned locations in Austria[i]. How did you navigate those early moments? Maybe it started out as more of a push, where we were looking to come in and work with a team. 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. [1] One hundred years later, Western Union launched the first domestic commercial geostationary satellite (Westar 1). Gartner Magic Quadrant for Low-Code Application Platforms, 2023. In just 11 months, we delivered a full-service digital banking experience that expands our relationship with customers.. But you say its about more than technology? We believe in the work we do, why we do it, and who we hire to get it done. ene. 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. Western Union has gained a comprehensive view of the customer while running the Data Cloud on AWS. In the past, JSON storage and analysis required specific JSON databases. These are more tactical, day-to-day ways to implement lean across the organization. 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. It is our responsibility to enable businesses, problem solvers, regulators and communities to leverage fintech for the betterment of lives. Western Union operates in the increasingly competitive, rapidly changing payments sector, where new fintech players are changing how the market operates. Western Union also opened franchise stores, which offer money transfer services as well as onsite currency exchanges. 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. (2013) Comparing Media Systems beyond the Western World. Singh is a proponent for a Central Bank Digital Currency, which he says is significantly different to the digital assets such as BitCoin and Ethereum, which can fluctuate wildly in value over short periods of time. We wont bug you too much because thats more work for all of us. 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. 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. Sector, Travel and Many of its 150 million customers worldwide depend on money transfers to pay for food, electricity, medication, and other necessities.

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