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. As the figure below shows, five components are needed to execute an organization's digital transformation: 1. In the past, JSON storage and analysis required specific JSON databases. [8]. 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. And on our website, we added new support and wayfinding tools to ensure customers could quickly and easily access information. The pandemics economic stressors created a situation where more people suddenly needed to send money to family and friends around the world, many of whom rarely use financial services. For more than 170 years Western Union has been helping people send money all over the world. Talend is our backbone for that work and have really evolved their product to meet our needs.. 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. 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. People. Migrants, who typically are the link between cash economies underserved by financial institutions, and highly bancarized, digital economies, benefit from Western Unions unique ability to combine the physical and the digital. 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. As a company, Western Union is in the middle of a transformational moment. 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. Dan Nordlander, senior vice president of Western Union Way Operations at Western Union, discusses his companys unique transformation journey with McKinseys Barr Seitz. Jaffin: Digital was critical in a few ways. Cole heads the 169-year-old company's digital transformation efforts, including the design and development of the software powering those consumer-facing platforms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 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. 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. Last year, the global-payment services giant completed 268 million consumer-to-consumer transactions worldwide, for a total of $80 billion. How did you evolve for digital convenience and safety? Sydney Mahan, The First Transcontinental Telegram was sent to DC 155 Years Ago, Washingtonian.com, Oct. 25, 2016. 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. To ensure those approaches were safe and secure, we partnered with governmental organizations to find new and secure ways to verify customers. 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. 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. 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. of Use, Payment 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. 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. 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. Mazzaferro: Snowflake is enabling quite a bit around analytics, reporting, event triggers, and settlement across our card providers. Best practices were also key. In [] So we established a set of what we call market-shaper practices that we wanted to focus on. . . New-found agility delivers growth and improved Customer Experience for partners and customers. . 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. Our digital-first crisis response is helping us evolve into the future. Not just front-end, but back office and our contact center. Banco Santander Consumer Portugal Adopts OutSystems as its Digital Transformation Platform. 2023 Snowflake Inc. All Rights Reserved | If youd rather not receive future emails from Snowflake, unsubscribe here or customize your communication preferences, Snowflake for Advertising, Media, & Entertainment, unsubscribe here or customize your communication preferences. Lean deployments are a big piece of our overall transformation program. Think of Western Union, and its yellow placard advertising an agent location comes to mind. In the latest step in its digital journey, Western Union recently launched a bot that enables Facebook Messenger users in the United States to send money to more than 200 countries, across 130 currencies, from within the messaging app. Why Do Companies Choose to Outsource Work? [7]For a helpful overview of how Blockchain is being used in emerging markets, see Vinay Gupta & Rob Knight, How Blockchain Could Help Emerging Markets Leap Ahead, Harvard Business Review, May 17, 2017. <br><br>My Leadership Philosophy<br><br>I am an . Complete your profile for personalized recommendations, Managing Director, U.S. Financial Services at Google. We will expand our Messenger bot to other countries and add other languages, he adds. 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. Inclusion, Bloomberg 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. According to the terms of the transaction . 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. Commenting on the advantages of development on OutSystems, Tom says, "We estimate that we're getting new products . Markets are perpetually shifting and change is unavoidable, but to keep up with those shifting tides companies need to stay focused on digital transformation. Kong, New And that could be at an operation site or it could be more of a frontline thing like a sales executive. Not satisfied with the idea of incremental change, the company took a start-from-scratch approach, assembling an experienced team and transforming its infrastructure. Team members were drawn from different continents and operating on different time zones. Mazzaferro: In the past, the thinking in the industry has often been that applications are king, and that data flows through the applications. 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. Learn what is a data platform, which encompass a range of elements required to support the data management cycle. Top retailers use AI-powered campaigns to engage their most valuable customers. To accelerate application development, improve agility, and provide great digital experiences, the company chose OutSystems as its high-performance low-code platform. The gap between access and use is growing, with 56% of people in . With a history of more than 170 years, the company has a presence in more than 200 countries and territories, connecting more than 120m people to one another and to the global economy, through cross-border money transfers in approximately 130 currencies. Does it offer a more seamless customer experience? Please enable Javascript to see this feature. 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. Western Union International Bank is licensed by the Austrian Financial Market Authority. 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. Its important to understand that business stakeholders are customers of our data. But Western Union is missing the true potential of blockchain for its business. Western Union is also focused on the global remittance market. 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. Transformation, Cyber For decades, Western Union benefited from network effects as it added density and new geographies. Chief Data and Innovation Officer, Western Union, Enterprise-grade scalability and security, Cloud-based IT architecture based on microservices. Seven months after Goldfinch Partners and The Baupost Group announced they were purchasing Western . The partnership will enable funds to be sent from countries around the world to mobile wallets across Africa through the organization's licensed payment rails. Western Union's Customer Journey Digital Transformation Fueled by NICE - Innovative NICE Nexidia Customer Journey Optimisation provides powerful analytics to enhance customer experience. 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. [3] Shelly Freierman, Telegram Falls Silent Stop Era Ends Stop, NY Times, Feb. 6, 2006. How do you start there and end up with a fully embedded transformation across a company of 12,000 people? Discover the latest software purchases and digital transformation initiatives being undertaken by Western Union and its business and technology executives. And if Western Union doesnt embrace and transform along with those technologies, it will fade away just like the telegraph. Some want to go to a retail store and pay cash. [5]. It works with Talend to streamline data movement in compliance with GDPR across financial, reconciliation, auditing and trading partners. In Western and Central Africa, only 36% of the population has access to broadband connectivity. The top challenge for businesses with digital transformation goals in 2023 is determining where their companies should direct spending on technologies, according to a BCG X report. She also has worked with ad agencies like Ogilvy and McCann. Western Union powers your pursuit. Western Union International Bank GmbH is regulated by the Financial Markets Authority in Austria, [i] Agent location count valid as of 31 December 2017. Western Union is the worlds first P2P company. Western Union's investment in India is part of a broader fintech and innovation strategy that is driving the company's digital transformation. The aim of this paper is to sketch a brief history of complex digital transformation of media and . 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. ; With the solution, Western Union launched a state-of-the-art digital . Today, WU.com is available in 40 countries, with mobile apps in 18 of them. Learn about JSON storage. This is just one example of how blockchain could be an opportunity for Western Union. That created a need to act. 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. If CDIOs dont have the right culture on their teams, how can they help drive a data-first culture throughout their organization? Thank you for this great post, Hans. The network upgrade will pave the way for Econet to deliver 5G connectivity in more . 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. 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. So we had to figure out how to continue to show up for customers while also ensuring everyones health and safely. We use OutSystems in multiple layers of our tech stack, says Tom. Garden, The Economist Western Union charges high fees since they need to cover rent and labor overhead. 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. 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. Now that these pilots are winding down, its been easy to get the support across the organization to find the resources necessary to establish teams that can scale it out in different areas across the company. . Feb 7, 2023. 2023Western Union Holdings, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Western Union. Poland followed later in 2022, while plans are at hand to launch Italy by the end of the year. Board Committees. 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. Were there tools or technology that were particularly helpful in your transformation? Head of Information Technology & Digital Transformation Econet Wireless Zimbabwe Oct 2015 - Present 7 years 6 months. Prior to implementing Snowflake in 2021, Western Unions data spanned 34 on-premises data warehouses, resulting in latency and operational burdens. Western Union is doing that. [1] The first transcontinental telegraph was sent on October 24, 1861, from the Chief Justice of California to President Abraham Lincoln. The Baupost Group is a $31 billion Boston-based investment firm. [2] Westar 1, Wikipedia, accessed April 2018. SEED aims to improve education and employability of students from low socio-economic backgrounds, especially children of refugees, migrants, and local families. Marketing tactics evolved to attract digital customers, who have a different profile from traditional retail customers. Swanback said a . Lastly, how do you see digital continuing to drive your services in the future? A doctor in London taps an app on her phone to transfer 500 pounds. They can include creating strategy placemats (one-page strategy overviews that are easily shared), frequent team huddles, one-on-one coaching, and process confirmation.

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