She has extensive experience in leading strategic marketing and has worked with brands like Myntra, Arrow, and Amante. With the blockchain environment, there may be value in the technology as it becomes more mature and efficient. | Learn more about Rokas kudas's work experience, education, connections & more by visiting their profile on . Lastly, how do you see digital continuing to drive your services in the future? Many of its 150 million customers worldwide depend on money transfers to pay for food, electricity, medication, and other necessities. How did you evolve for digital convenience and safety? This is a powerful tool for our business and one of the key capabilities of our new infrastructure.. People. [1] One hundred years later, Western Union launched the first domestic commercial geostationary satellite (Westar 1). Dan Nordlander is senior vice president of Western Union Way Operations at Western Union, and Barr Seitz is senior manager of editorial and digital communications in McKinseys New York office. Download the Western Union (WU) money transfer app and quickly start sending cash to Mexico and worldwide, 24/7! Its in our DNA to think about global operations because Western Union covers the world.. Arab Emirates. Board Committees. UnionDigital Bank is the trusted bridge between innovation and regulation. Western Union can leverage such physical presence to win this new innovative space. Sources for images:Western Union vs. Bitcoin, Bitland,MyWU,Ripple Union. Jay Jaffin was just starting his role as Western Union's chief marketing officer when the pandemic arrived. Head of Information Technology & Digital Transformation Econet Wireless Zimbabwe Oct 2015 - Present 7 years 6 months. [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. As a company, Western Union is in the middle of a transformational moment. However, Western Union doesnt view its established retail business as totally separate from the digital world. For more than 170 years Western Union has been helping people send money all over the world. Digital is all about how we reach the customer. We're making content recommendations better for thousands of readers. 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. Business Unit Represents Approximately 7% of Company Revenue Divestiture Will Support Western Union's Strategic Focus on its Global Cross-Border Payments Platform and Digital Capabilities The Western Union Company (NYSE: WU), a global leader in cross-border, cross-currency money movement and payments, together with Goldfinch Partners, LLC ("Goldfinch"), a private equity firm investing in . 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. Deep divides in digital connectivity, internet use, and access remain. In order to fund the investments, we decided that it was really important to do a transformation exercise, look for ways to gain efficiencies and effectiveness across our processes and procedures, and then use those efficiencies to fund the growth investments. It is far more stable than that and can be used for near instant settlements across the board, while providing liquidity to Reserve Banks. Western Union's Customer Journey Digital Transformation Fueled by NICE - Innovative NICE Nexidia Customer Journey Optimisation provides powerful analytics to enhance customer experience. 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. She also has worked with ad agencies like Ogilvy and McCann. These initiatives will likely change Western Unions operating model, therefore they must be fully supported by CEO Hikmet Ersek and should occupy most of his time. As weve done that, everyone has started to speak the same language, whether its talking about going to huddles, doing process confirmations, conducting one-on-one coaching, or maybe doing floor walks. Harveer Singh, Chief Data Architect & Global Head of Engineering, reveals how the initiative will give the organisation the speed and agility it needs to . We offer consumers the choices they want, both for sending and receiving money, he stresses. Enterprise Technology Operations Center Manager. We continue to experiment with the technology and time will tell if it offers a better alternative to traditional rails.. Now data is the driver and applications are being developed to handle that data and represent it to business stakeholders to make it consumable. Its not done from the perspective of correction or a negative consequence. Technology, Industrial According to the terms of the transaction . Does it offer a more seamless customer experience? Thats changing. Rapid iteration is a crucial capability for Western Union, especially when designing customer experiencesin over 200 countries with local customer and regulatory requirements. And the new business model may require a very different RPP (traditional money transfer process vs. transfer via blockchain). The company considers local preferences, as well, accepting about 10 payment methods, such as Apple Pay in the U.S. For example, De Beers is trying to create a diamond blockchain for registration and authentication, to prevent the spread of conflict diamonds. 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. 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. For example, we began offering an option for telephone money transfer. We believe in the work we do, why we do it, and who we hire to get it done. Knowledge Institute, Chemical Transfers can be delivered in cash or into a digital wallet or a bank account via electronic funds transfer. Leadership. This would help Western Union objectively pursue new blockchain opportunities, even if those opportunities eventually cannibalize or destroy its existing C2C business. 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. 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 . These are things like rewards and recognition, top-down innovation, and consequence management. Cortex, Infosys In the past several years, the Englewood, Colo.-based company has made a point to develop and [] The role of CDO needs to encompass more than data management and data governance, more than even enabling the pipeline and managing the environments. Western Union offers digital transactions in 70 countries to move money around the world. People who knew how a team or a group worked before can come in and see its night-and-day different. 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 (WU) is a global leader in cross-border, cross-currency money movement and payments. New-found agility delivers growth and improved Customer Experience for partners and customers. [11] Western Unions footprint of retail locations gives it a worldwide laboratory for experimenting with blockchain applications. The fusion of the digital and the physical, the irrepressible rise of new technologies. Digital transformation in the EU. It requires a change in process and culture, the adoption of a common lingo, executive buy-in, and a center . 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 Union must adapt to an increasingly mobile world: if Western Union doesnt develop low-cost mobile money transfers, Western Union wont be able to compete with new competitors like Ant Financial and Zelle. ene. Having found great success with its Marketing Cloud, Singh outlines his longer-term vision to connect a number of Western Unions central products. As such, when Western Union embarked on its technology transformation, it was keen to recruit personnel who could help achieve its vision. Strategic partnerships working with platforms like Google is a critical piece of that. 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. of Use, Payment 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. 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. Data privacy and security practices . (2017) Monitoring Media Pluralism in Europe: Application of the Media Pluralism Monitor 2016 in the European Union, Montenegro and Turkey. 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. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press [10]Jeff John Roberts, Western Union is Testing Ripple and XRP for Money Transfers, Fortune, Feb. 14, 2018. The map, Barmer and Newman say, is designed to do precisely that turn the western Pennsylvania fish-fry culture into an adventure stamped onto the landscape that fosters community engagement . Meeting the moment with solutions required Western Union to accelerate its own digital transformation. Some development teams suffer 100 percent attrition in two to three years., "OutSystems helps in many ways. To ensure those approaches were safe and secure, we partnered with governmental organizations to find new and secure ways to verify customers. Western Union powers your pursuit. Part of this agility drive involved Western Union migrating its legacy on-prem IT infrastructure to the Cloud. Now its more pull. Its created a need for financial sector brands to step up and help by democratizing access to their services via mobile phones. The digital transformation is helping Western Union emerge from a challenging two-year era. 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). With OutSystems, we deploy twice every week. So its a real imperative across the top of the organization. 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. & Distribution, Media and As we get the pilots completed, the idea is to turn the WU Way team into more of a center of excellence. Contributed to establishing Quality Assurance, Training and Documentation strategy and processes for AML Operations functions. Denver, Colorado. This is just one example of how blockchain could be an opportunity for Western Union. In Austria our employees have put in place numerous initiatives such as German courses and mentoring programs, and we celebrated in March the first anniversary of SEED, a project supported by the Western Union Foundation in collaboration with the Austrian Ministry of Education and Teach for Austria Alumni Association. 2021. 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. Join us to learn how your organization can become a leader in the Data Economy and the business benefits that result. How Your Small Business Can Be Managed With The Right Databases, Why Businesses Must Focus on Introducing Technology in the Workplace. Goldfinch Partners is a private equity firm investing in businesses specialising in digital transformation. 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. Cookies help us deliver our services. [3] Shelly Freierman, Telegram Falls Silent Stop Era Ends Stop, NY Times, Feb. 6, 2006. Prior to implementing Snowflake in 2021, Western Unions data spanned 34 on-premises data warehouses, resulting in latency and operational burdens. 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. 35, No. And on our website, we added new support and wayfinding tools to ensure customers could quickly and easily access information. 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 reason for that is due to the huge increase in demand for our digital services as lockdowns were implemented across many different geographies. There are 13 of these practices, and thats really how were assessing success with the transformation across the organization. And that could be at an operation site or it could be more of a frontline thing like a sales executive. 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 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. . 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. Snowflake: What do you see changing now that your organization is better able to share data? 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. 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.. Hiring experienced developers was already hard, and the skills drought got even worse with the great resignation. The resulting report, How to Win in the Data Economy, includes anecdotes from dozens of customers, analysts, and influencers about how to succeed, all in addition to the survey itself, based on feedback from 1,000 senior business, technology, and data managers across five industries and from all over the world. Snowflake worked with Longitude to assess what it takes to lead in the data economy. 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. Policy . Seven months after Goldfinch Partners and The Baupost Group announced they were purchasing Western . 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. 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. When people send money to friends or family across the country or around the world, chances are good that Western Union is involved. Discover the latest data, insights, and inspiration from Think with Google. . Because if you dont have the right data, your applications will struggle to provide the right business outcomes and customer experiences. 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. We developed the whole front-end for the app in less than four months., Western Union uses OutSystems for customer-facing apps, back office, and workflow solutions. Leadership Team. Western Union has innovated before. 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. The Transformation Story of Western Digital. 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. Automation, Microsoft Digital transformation can refer to anything from IT modernization (for example, cloud computing), to digital optimization, to the invention of new digital business models. 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. Western Union now has more than 550,000 agent locations in more than 200 countries. 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. Not just front-end, but back office and our contact center. Western Union. But new innovators are highlighting a problem for Western Union: multi-homing is high with money transfers. Continue to partner with popular digital platforms to provide legacy C2C money transfer services. Data and insights gave us the ability to make important strategic decisions in the throes of what could have been a panic. 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. 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. 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. What are the biggest lessons you learned? Poland followed later in 2022, while plans are at hand to launch Italy by the end of the year. January 25, 2019 | Video. Looking ahead, the Sales Cloud will be connected to the Marketing Cloud, which in turn is connected to our Care Cloud, so that whenever something happens across any of those products we are able to react in a way that suits that customer.