Every year or two we rescore ourselves in a company-wide exercise to see where were making progress and where were falling behind. [8]. People are enthusiastic about the results of the pilot, and they want to see that in their own area. My mission is to empower people to become economically self-reliant. 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. Its in our DNA to think about global operations because Western Union covers the world.. Manufacturing, Information Services 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. Western Union launched its digital banking app in Germany and Romania in Spring 2022, following 11 months of iterative development. It works with Talend to streamline data movement in compliance with GDPR across financial, reconciliation, auditing and trading partners. 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. Over the last two years, Singh has been accelerating Western Union's tech plan. Secure, touchless, digital money transfers were a safe, reliable way for people to send funds where they needed to, so we leaned in there. 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. Hearing from customers helped us focus our messaging on two key ideas: digital convenience and staying safe through contactless funds transfer. Arab Emirates. 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. Discover the latest data, insights, and inspiration from Think with Google. Harveer Singh, Chief Data Architect & Global Head of Engineering, reveals how the initiative will give the organisation the speed and agility it needs to . Because if you dont have the right data, your applications will struggle to provide the right business outcomes and customer experiences. 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. 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. 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. 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. Manufacturing, Communication Last year, the global-payment services giant completed 268 million consumer-to-consumer transactions worldwide, for a total of $80 billion. Mazzaferro: Keep it simple. Contributed to establishing Quality Assurance, Training and Documentation strategy and processes for AML Operations functions. Today, structured and semi-structured data can easily coincide. Technology, Industrial 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. Data privacy and security practices . These are seismic factors currently redefining our world, earning their own epochal moniker: The Fourth Industrial Revolution. What we are talking about is not cryptocurrency, it is not something that has to be mined. Continue to partner with popular digital platforms to provide legacy C2C money transfer services. ; With the solution, Western Union launched a state-of-the-art digital . Deloitte announces multi-year collaboration with AWS to co-innovate and engineer solutions that help institutions expedite the launch of digital banking services and modernize their legacy core banking stacks. Harare Responsible for . We do that both in-line, so you as a manager go and visit your own organization, but also visit other functions. On May 17, 2018, at the Digital Assembly in Sofia, Bulgaria, the European Commission launched the Digital Agenda for the Western Balkans. And when you have that, it becomes easier to have a stronger level of influence than you might otherwise expect with a small team, because everyone in the organization is clear that, whether youre working directly with the WU Way team or not, your job is to find ways for continuous improvement. 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. For example, De Beers is trying to create a diamond blockchain for registration and authentication, to prevent the spread of conflict diamonds. Thats the high performancewe rely on with OutSystems., Low-Code for Digital Financial Services Delivery. Digital transformation in Western Union must be driven from the top-down. Western Union's digital transformation efforts may fail to drive earnings growth, but they may be enough to keep earnings steady going forward. Strategic partnerships working with platforms like Google is a critical piece of that. 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. We recently delivered a similar requirement to a higher standard using one OutSystems developer in just 15 days. Think of Western Union, and its yellow placard advertising an agent location comes to mind. [9]Clayton M. Christensen & Michael E. Raynor,The Innovators Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth (Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 2003), Ch. She also has worked with ad agencies like Ogilvy and McCann. These are things like rewards and recognition, top-down innovation, and consequence management. 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. - Access cash back rewards at the WU store. People. [3] Shelly Freierman, Telegram Falls Silent Stop Era Ends Stop, NY Times, Feb. 6, 2006. Lastly, how do you see digital continuing to drive your services in the future? Rapid growth in technology was making it easy for international money transfers to take place online, Fellahi recalls. Thats changing. 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 . 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. Mazzaferro: Snowflake is enabling quite a bit around analytics, reporting, event triggers, and settlement across our card providers. Many of its 150 million customers worldwide depend on money transfers to pay for food, electricity, medication, and other necessities. Product Director, United States Money Transfer. Western Union. In the past, JSON storage and analysis required specific JSON databases. Western Union has the infrastructure to help make that a reality. Most popular: Free $20 Amazon.com e-gift code for every friend you refer (earn up to $500). 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. Society Updated: 01-06-2022 - 11:45. [1] The first transcontinental telegraph was sent on October 24, 1861, from the Chief Justice of California to President Abraham Lincoln. Korea, United Furthermore, a chain of retail outlets is expensive. Enterprise Technology Operations Center Manager. Updated on. 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. Western Union is a global leader in cross-border, cross-currency money movement and payments. We started function by function, looking at individual deployments across our different groups in the company. They tend to be younger, they live online and they prefer to do everything there, at the touch of a button, Fellahi observes. Thats really enabled a lot more collaboration across groups. Entertainment, Professional . 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. And the new business model may require a very different RPP (traditional money transfer process vs. transfer via blockchain). & Distribution, Media and 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. 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. 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). Analytics, API Economy & Its more about having the manager understand how the work actually gets done on the floor. 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]. We embrace the white canvas and first principles design, breaking away from legacy systems to create smart . With OutSystems, we deploy twice every week. My team and I had thought of the future being digital, of course, but the pandemic really forced us to make it a reality for the business. By using our services, you agree to our use of cookies. Western Union has gained a comprehensive view of the customer while running the Data Cloud on AWS. The transition from legacy systems to Oracle Solutions was critical to the strategy's success. [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. Leaders across many industries and companies of all sizes report that one of their biggest challenges is siloed data. And its not something you can achieve really quickly, its a multiple-year process. 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 . Discover how Santander Consumer Finance replaced 70% of their core IT systems in three years with OutSystems. The gap between access and use is growing, with 56% of people in . | Learn more about Rokas kudas's work experience, education, connections & more by visiting their profile on . As a company, Western Union is in the middle of a transformational moment. The international roll-out continues to other countries at pace. We go where our customers go, says Khalid Fellahi, senior vice president and general manager for Western Union Digital, based in San Francisco. The company wanted to improve the digital experiences offered to customers and build new digital bankingproducts to extend its relationship with customers. . Cole heads the 169-year-old company's digital transformation efforts, including the design and development of the software powering those consumer-facing platforms. In 2017, Western Union invested $200 million and 20% of its workforce on compliance functions.