People who knew how a team or a group worked before can come in and see its night-and-day different. 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. Institute, Infosys Innovation 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. InsurTech & Crypto projects as the world embraces CX, Business Transformation and Digital . Navigating complex land title issues would also leverage Western Unions existing capabilities of dealing with a range of government regulations. Mohua Das Gupta - Head of Marketing, Tata CliQ. Banco Santander Consumer Portugal Adopts OutSystems as its Digital Transformation Platform. Over the last two years, Singh has been accelerating Western Union's tech plan. Zealand, South 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. Security, Infosys The company, which has been in the money-transfer business since 1871, launched online transfers via WU.com in 2000 and got into mobile money transfers in 2007. These are things like rewards and recognition, top-down innovation, and consequence management. 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. 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. ", Tom adds, In fast-moving customer-facing scenarios, development is never build-once-and-doneyoure always iterating to refine the customer experience. By using our services, you agree to our use of cookies. 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. 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. We wanted plug-and-play convenience to integrate any technology.. We teach employees, and then they execute. Team members were drawn from different continents and operating on different time zones. 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. Youre expected to find ways to optimize your processes and drive value. Technology powers the data economy. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Digital Bulletin exists to tell the story. Services, High Youre expected to come up with new ways of innovation to drive revenue growth across the organization. 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. People. Reframe blockchain from a threat to an opportunity, by creating a new autonomous unit. Western Union. Poland followed later in 2022, while plans are at hand to launch Italy by the end of the year. Youre starting to see that happen culturally. Over the last two years, Singh has been accelerating Western Union's tech plan. Manufacturing, Communication 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. These are more tactical, day-to-day ways to implement lean across the organization. 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. These strategies are paying off. This does have privacy implications and hence needs to be vetted out with regulatory authorities around the world. Chief Data and Innovation Officer, Western Union, Enterprise-grade scalability and security, Cloud-based IT architecture based on microservices. [12]Josh Constine, Western Union Brings Money Transfer and Its Tricky Fees to Chat Apps, TechCrunch.com, Feb. 4, 2016. The second aspect is our agile work, where we spin up teams that have learned and are now experts in using agile methodologies for product launches or IT development. Wingspan, Infosys The difference with OutSystems is that we can do that fast and at scale, deploying experiences that are fast to load, reliable, and secure. Gartner Magic Quadrant for Low-Code Application Platforms, 2023. Join us to learn how your organization can become a leader in the Data Economy and the business benefits that result. Lean deployments are a big piece of our overall transformation program. We offer consumers the choices they want, both for sending and receiving money, he stresses. [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. Think of Western Union, and its yellow placard advertising an agent location comes to mind. My Career Summary Anil Santhapuri is a values-based and results-oriented Talent professional, with 20 years of professional experience in the areas of talent management, learning & leadership development. Western Union International Bank GmbH is regulated by the Financial Markets Authority in Austria, [i] Agent location count valid as of 31 December 2017. We recently delivered a similar requirement to a higher standard using one OutSystems developer in just 15 days. 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. First, for continuity of services. 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.. Provide value consistently every month and deliver new value and capabilities. Kong, New Jay Jaffin was just starting his role as Western Unions chief marketing officer when the pandemic arrived. Rapid growth in technology was making it easy for international money transfers to take place online, Fellahi recalls. 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. Western Union uses a central team to build new capabilities across the business. So we had to figure out how to continue to show up for customers while also ensuring everyones health and safely. Procurement & Construction, Financial I also agree with you that the competitive advantage of Western Union is a broad network of retail footprint across the world. You stepped in as CMO just as COVID-19 was emerging, and I cant imagine that a global health crisis was what youd envisioned for your first 100 days. For decades, Western Union has defended its global position by investing in regulatory compliance. Western Union will likely face internal resistance from three sources. People are enthusiastic about the results of the pilot, and they want to see that in their own area. Entertainment, Professional 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. Professors from HEC, ESCP business school, and leading carriers shared insights on . 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 culture change has to be driven across teams to show how technology has enabled different and better outcomes. Technology or Operations transformation . We use OutSystems in multiple layers of our tech stack, says Tom. Maybe it started out as more of a push, where we were looking to come in and work with a team. 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. Experience in leading digital products from either the financial services, payment, or fintech industries. That makes it much easier to go into other areas of the organization and say, We did this in this part of the company. 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. Africa's largest payment gateway, MFS Africa, has partnered with Western Union to enable individuals and businesses across the continent to receive money What are the biggest lessons you learned? Sub-Saharan Africa 3G and 4G mobile broadband coverage stands at 86% and 57% of the population, respectively. Mazzaferro: Keep it simple. The Baupost Group is a $31 billion Boston-based investment firm. 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. Originally, the capacity of our on-prem environments wasnt projected to hit capacity until 2022, but we could see that point was going to be reached in 2020, so that meant a real acceleration.. 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. [6], However, regulators cant keep pace with the wave of new blockchain applications. Jaffin: Evolution meant expanding the ways in which customers experience the brand digitally. Part of this agility drive involved Western Union migrating its legacy on-prem IT infrastructure to the Cloud. 8 (Managing the Strategy Development Process). As a global leader in cross-border, cross-currency money movement and payments, Western Union has to comply with a huge number of financial regulations. According to the terms of the transaction . Western Union charges high fees since they need to cover rent and labor overhead. One moment later, in Shimla, a hill country city in India, close to the ridge of the Himalayan foothills, a cashier at the . Western Union is a global leader in cross-border, cross-currency money movement and payments. Behind those market-shaper practices are the lean tools and behaviors we develop and encourage. 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.. & Distribution, Media and Management, Digital Workplace Fellahi sees the Messenger bot as a promising tool. Jaffin: Its important for us to continue trying new technology that gets us closer to customers and their changing needs, like advanced analytics and other tools. 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. 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. Introducing the next-generation operating model, Winning with your talent-management strategy. 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. How Western Union achieved Digital Transformation with Infosys and Oracle. While WU is considered a global leader in their space, competitive insights and . As the figure below shows, five components are needed to execute an organization's digital transformation: 1. . 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. Navigate Key takeaways. Society Updated: 01-06-2022 - 11:45. As the transformation gets embedded into the organization, the businesses start to run their own agile deployments. Recently I talked to him about the companys rapid pivot to digital this past year, his biggest learnings, and what the future holds. The reason for that is due to the huge increase in demand for our digital services as lockdowns were implemented across many different geographies. Cortex, Infosys Think of Western Union, and its yellow placard advertising an agent location comes to mind. The author approaches the problem using public. 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 . What does "digital transformation" mean to Western Union? Western Union is a global leader in cross-border, cross-currency money movement and payments. 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. Nov 2011 - Present11 years 5 months. Here is Swamy Sivasubramaniyan, Head of Financial Services and Settlement Platform for Western Union, discussing the digital transformation experience with Infosys and Oracle. 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. Today, structured and semi-structured data can easily coincide. 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. In the past several years, the Englewood, Colo.-based company has made a point to develop and [] Its not done from the perspective of correction or a negative consequence. The Data Cloud is increasingly becoming a facilitator for digital transformation initiatives, and while there are many facets to that story, our customers often tell us how three critical elements play a central role: being able to access and share live data; being able to share data without having to move it; and the ability to securely access third-party data. OutSystems provides the innovation and agility to accelerate the digital transformation of Western Union. Denver, Colorado. 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. In Western and Central Africa, only 36% of the population has access to broadband connectivity. . This would help Western Union objectively pursue new blockchain opportunities, even if those opportunities eventually cannibalize or destroy its existing C2C business. "As users turn to our services in bigger numbers and as many new digital players come to the market, we know we have to change," he says. Harare Responsible for . 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.. For more than 170 years Western Union has been helping people send money all over the world. The international roll-out continues to other countries at pace. In just 11 months, we delivered a full-service digital banking experience that expands our relationship with customers.. Beyond the public health crisis, COVID-19 has had a devastating impact on personal finances, causing poverty levels and inequality to rise globally. 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. Hospitality, Waste To address this new competitive landscape, Western Union sought an agility boost to accelerate innovation. The Western Union Way of digital transformation. The network upgrade will pave the way for Econet to deliver 5G connectivity in more . 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. Technology, Industrial 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. 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 caught up with Mazzaferro to dive deeper into how the Data Cloud enables ongoing digital . There are 13 of these practices, and thats really how were assessing success with the transformation across the organization. That created a need to act. 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 know there are certain systems that we cannot just move to the cloud straight away such as the AS400 IBM mainframe, but weve managed to take the ecosystem that surrounds our legacy technology and move it to the cloud and we think we can get everything to the cloud before the end of the year. And the new business model may require a very different RPP (traditional money transfer process vs. transfer via blockchain). Now its more pull. Others prefer to prepare a transaction online and then go to a retail location to pay cash. Western Union has innovated before. Western Union is one of the largest digital money firms, uniquely positioned to connect the cash and digital worlds across platforms, devices, borders, and currencies. 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. The CDO needs to drive digital transformation by enabling data to power product development and the company. . The EU is helping to boost Europe's digital capacities and create new opportunities for businesses and consumers while safeguarding basic rights. How did you evolve for digital convenience and safety? With the blockchain environment, there may be value in the technology as it becomes more mature and efficient. One of our most important tools is the floor walk. 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. Jaffin: Digital was critical in a few ways. And that could be at an operation site or it could be more of a frontline thing like a sales executive. Most of the customers for remittance service (e.g. Inclusion, Bloomberg Before OutSystems, we typically released every six weeks. Cole heads the 169-year-old company's digital transformation efforts, including the design and development of the software powering those consumer-facing platforms. That means we can onboard new developers and have them productive much faster, and weve got fewer knowledge silos in the development team., Moreover, low-code development on OutSystems helps Tom fight back in the war for digital talent. 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.. Western Union built its platform by assembling a global network of third party agents. of Use, Payment Western Union (WU) is a global leader in cross-border, cross-currency money movement and payments. The transition from legacy systems to Oracle Solutions was critical to the strategy's success. Data privacy and security practices . 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 . Consumers can 'Send Now, Pay Later' by borrowing up to AUD 2000 through Beforepay's wage-advance product on Western Union's digital channels. New-found agility delivers growth and improved Customer Experience for partners and customers. Transformation, Cyber He reveals that Western Union was using multiple companies for each of its email, in-app and SMS communication channels. Digital transformation in the EU. 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. Services, Consumer However, Western Union would be wise to form a new, separate unit for exploring blockchain services. Almost immediately, it was clear that with retail stores temporarily closed, digital would need to play a larger role in delivering service to customers. 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. 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). [12]These kind of digital initiatives are good pursuits for current operational leaders, since they represent incremental or modular innovations to Western Unions existing product offerings. Its time to align your banks digital transformation strategy with the entire customer lifecycle by providing a personalized omnichannel experience. 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.. & Publishing, Logistics 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 launched its digital banking app in Germany and Romania in Spring 2022, following 11 months of iterative development.