Western Union (NYSE: WU), a global leader in cross-border, cross-currency money movement and payments and Zain Cash, the award-winning mobile financia . They have also triggered profound changes within global banking, demanding that lenders remain flexible, nimble, and innovative in their digital-banking strategies to meet customers' rapidly . Discover the latest data, insights, and inspiration from Think with Google. It requires a change in process and culture, the adoption of a common lingo, executive buy-in, and a center . Youre now a year into your role as CMO and leading through a prolonged global crisis. One of our most important tools is the floor walk. The development speedand deployment easeprovided by OutSystems accelerates change and feedback cycles, which paves the way for continuous innovation. Guide for Suppliers, Select However, Western Union would be wise to form a new, separate unit for exploring blockchain services. 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. As the figure below shows, five components are needed to execute an organization's digital transformation: 1. [5] 2017 Annual ReportCEO Letter (noting Western Union has expanded its fund payout network to billions of bank accounts). Western Union International Bank is licensed by the Austrian Financial Market Authority. Best practices were also key. Others prefer to prepare a transaction online and then go to a retail location to pay cash. [1] The first transcontinental telegraph was sent on October 24, 1861, from the Chief Justice of California to President Abraham Lincoln. Whats really nice about that is that its so visually obvious. To explore this content and receive communications from Google, please sign in with an existing Google account. Big data has helped Western Union merge data across multiple channels for years, for marketing and promotion, customer lifecycle management, compliance and fraud modeling. Data safety. 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. 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.. "As a digital enabler and a pioneer in the digital transformation, we aspire to play a vital role in the vision of the Saudi . New-found agility delivers growth and improved Customer Experience for partners and customers. He also praises Snowflakes adaptability when it came to dealing with huge capacity increases. Its time to align your banks digital transformation strategy with the entire customer lifecycle by providing a personalized omnichannel experience. And that could be at an operation site or it could be more of a frontline thing like a sales executive. Western Union has innovated before. Swanback said a . Board of Directors. 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. Digital is all about how we reach the customer. Increasingly, digital technology and mobile devices play a key role in these transactions. Hiring experienced developers was already hard, and the skills drought got even worse with the great resignation. Its not done from the perspective of correction or a negative consequence. Security, Infosys 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. To ensure those approaches were safe and secure, we partnered with governmental organizations to find new and secure ways to verify customers. If Western Union tries to grow its blockchain capabilities within current operations, internal resistors may directly or indirectly sabotage the initiatives. Chief Data and Innovation Officer, Western Union, Enterprise-grade scalability and security, Cloud-based IT architecture based on microservices. Almost immediately, it was clear that with retail stores temporarily closed, digital would need to play a larger role in delivering service to customers. People are enthusiastic about the results of the pilot, and they want to see that in their own area. They can include creating strategy placemats (one-page strategy overviews that are easily shared), frequent team huddles, one-on-one coaching, and process confirmation. Introducing the next-generation operating model, Winning with your talent-management strategy. Finance. Western Union also opened franchise stores, which offer money transfer services as well as onsite currency exchanges. If CDIOs dont have the right culture on their teams, how can they help drive a data-first culture throughout their organization? & Distribution, Media and One of its most high-profile hires was Harveer Singh, who was appointed as Chief Data Architect & Global Head of Engineering and previously co-led EYs Next Generation architecture & solutions for Financial Services. 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 . 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. Western Union's stock price continued to climb the week of April 12 reaching $25.89, compared to a low of $21.66 in January. In just 11 months, we delivered a full-service digital banking experience that expands our relationship with customers.. Contributed to establishing Quality Assurance, Training and Documentation strategy and processes for AML Operations functions. Having got the right people in place, Singh and his team set about building a partner network to supercharge Western Unions technology evolution. 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. 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. As such, when Western Union embarked on its technology transformation, it was keen to recruit personnel who could help achieve its vision. A large proportion of Western Unions infrastructure has been migrated to the cloud, and Singh reveals a timeline to complete the programme of work. 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. Data privacy and security practices . Why Do Companies Choose to Outsource Work? We position ourselves as creating opportunity for financial inclusion by bridging gaps in the financial services sector. People who knew how a team or a group worked before can come in and see its night-and-day different. We are also launching new products into the market, including a pilot for digital banking services in select markets in Europe and a revamped loyalty programme, which require us to capture data from our central warehouses to drive decision making, marketing and customer acquisition. Were there tools or technology that were particularly helpful in your transformation? Garden, The Economist There were definitely times I was looking at costs and thinking how I was going to explain to finance, or my CFO, he says. Tom Mazzaferro, Chief Data Officer at Western Union together with Nick Halsey, CEO at Okera talk about the technology that Western Union has adopted to help build new products and Western Union, Chief Data Officer: Digital Transformation Initiatives (Part 3) | Cloud | cdomagazine.tech 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. Discover how Santander Consumer Finance replaced 70% of their core IT systems in three years with OutSystems. The digital transformation is helping Western Union emerge from a challenging two-year era. 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. Learn what is a data platform, which encompass a range of elements required to support the data management cycle. For decades, Western Union has defended its global position by investing in regulatory compliance. Harare Responsible for . 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.. Log in to help. Lastly, how do you see digital continuing to drive your services in the future? [9]Clayton M. Christensen & Michael E. Raynor,The Innovators Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth (Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 2003), Ch. On May 17, 2018, at the Digital Assembly in Sofia, Bulgaria, the European Commission launched the Digital Agenda for the Western Balkans. There was a need to accelerate the process we wanted to undertake, I have that experience of transformation projects happening on a massive scale. 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. Convera. 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. Services, Consumer Kong, New By John Manning, International Banker. Before OutSystems, we typically released every six weeks. 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. Entertainment, Professional . Western Union Uses AWS to Create Company-Wide Digital Transformation. InsurTech & Crypto projects as the world embraces CX, Business Transformation and Digital . Services, High She also has worked with ad agencies like Ogilvy and McCann. Knowledge Institute, Chemical Transfers can be delivered in cash or into a digital wallet or a bank account via electronic funds transfer. In a report on ERP modernization, the global market intelligence firm highlights how Western Digital . <br><br>My Leadership Philosophy<br><br>I am an . 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. Youre expected to find ways to optimize your processes and drive value. Society Updated: 01-06-2022 - 11:45. McKinsey's Kausik Rajgopal and Lang Davison recently sat down with Western Union's CEO to talk about its multicultural customer base (and . 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 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. From apps that save lives to those that process loans in a . Western Union operates in the increasingly competitive, rapidly changing payments sector, where new fintech players are changing how the market operates. During its February 2018 earnings call, CEO Hikmet Ersek announced that Western Union is experimenting with Ripple for settling transactions and for capital optimization, and is also testing Ripples native currency (XRP).[10]. We do that both in-line, so you as a manager go and visit your own organization, but also visit other functions. That support has made it a lot easier to have the influence we need to make the transformation successful. Prior to implementing Snowflake in 2021, Western Unions data spanned 34 on-premises data warehouses, resulting in latency and operational burdens. 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. Youre starting to see that happen culturally. But you say its about more than technology? Most of the customers for remittance service (e.g.