Head of Information Technology & Digital Transformation Econet Wireless Zimbabwe Oct 2015 - Present 7 years 6 months. Lean deployments are a big piece of our overall transformation program. Data privacy and security practices . Procurement & Construction, Financial For more than 170 years Western Union has been helping people send money all over the world. Log in to help. From the earliest days of the pandemic, innovating the companys services to meet new patterns of consumer demand was an urgent matter. In Western and Central Africa, only 36% of the population has access to broadband connectivity. To address this new competitive landscape, Western Union sought an agility boost to accelerate innovation. Download the Western Union (WU) money transfer app and quickly start sending cash to Mexico and worldwide, 24/7! Its an ecosystem of complementary platforms that enable a seamless, single customer experience I think thats such a powerful proposition.. So we had to figure out how to continue to show up for customers while also ensuring everyones health and safely. In 2017, Western Union invested $200 million and 20% of its workforce on compliance functions. He also praises Snowflakes adaptability when it came to dealing with huge capacity increases. Western Union uses a central team to build new capabilities across the business. And its not something you can achieve really quickly, its a multiple-year process. [1] One hundred years later, Western Union launched the first domestic commercial geostationary satellite (Westar 1). [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. 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. When people send money to friends or family across the country or around the world, chances are good that Western Union is involved. Theyll be there to help you stay on track or course correct when you have troubles. Digital is all about how we reach the customer. 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.. According to the terms of the transaction . Experience in leading digital products from either the financial services, payment, or fintech industries. Continue to partner with popular digital platforms to provide legacy C2C money transfer services. Filipino workers abroad), they need to bring physical money somewhere, and most of the fintech companies in remittance space dont have their own channels (they often partner with local kiosks). Navigate - Access cash back rewards at the WU store. Its been a great combination. And still others want to do it all online.. [2]But today, new technologies are threatening Western Unions entire business model. s full anLearn more about the data lake, a repository for structured, unstructured, and semi-structured data that provided direct access to raw organizational data. Swanback said a . How did you evolve for digital convenience and safety? [2] Westar 1, Wikipedia, accessed April 2018. If you are a new customer: now you can transfer your FIRST money transfer for FREE*. But new innovators are highlighting a problem for Western Union: multi-homing is high with money transfers. 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. Our digital-first crisis response is helping us evolve into the future. While WU is considered a global leader in their space, competitive insights and . The company wanted to improve the digital experiences offered to customers and build new digital bankingproducts to extend its relationship with customers. [9]Clayton M. Christensen & Michael E. Raynor,The Innovators Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth (Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 2003), Ch. 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. 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. In 2011, Western Union opened an office in San Francisco to ramp up its digital operation. InsurTech & Crypto projects as the world embraces CX, Business Transformation and Digital . The fusion of the digital and the physical, the irrepressible rise of new technologies. You have to recognise that youre taking a massive journey as a company because it has always relied on data centres. Rica, Hong 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 Union's investment in India is part of a broader fintech and innovation strategy that is driving the company's digital transformation. The transformation of Western Digital to a Live Enterprise Modernization of legacy enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications provides an opportunity for a technical upgrade as well as a transformation of the core business, according to IDC. 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 . The reason for that is due to the huge increase in demand for our digital services as lockdowns were implemented across many different geographies. 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. Ericsson will help accelerate Econet's digital transformation journey. Western Union has recently partnered with other digital platforms to expand its digital offerings. Western Union built its platform by assembling a global network of third party agents. 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. Transfers can be delivered in cash or into a digital wallet or a bank account via electronic funds transfer. Discover the latest data, insights, and inspiration from Think with Google. Jaffin: Evolution meant expanding the ways in which customers experience the brand digitally. Jay Jaffin was just starting his role as Western Unions chief marketing officer when the pandemic arrived. Teams that may not previously have interacted with each other are now doing floor walks with each other. For example, we began offering an option for telephone money transfer. First, for continuity of services. As the figure below shows, five components are needed to execute an organization's digital transformation: 1. It requires a change in process and culture, the adoption of a common lingo, executive buy-in, and a center . We recently delivered a similar requirement to a higher standard using one OutSystems developer in just 15 days. He reveals that Western Union was using multiple companies for each of its email, in-app and SMS communication channels. Data and insights gave us the ability to make important strategic decisions in the throes of what could have been a panic. Korea, United I also agree with you that the competitive advantage of Western Union is a broad network of retail footprint across the world. UnionDigital Bank is the trusted bridge between innovation and regulation. Not satisfied with the idea of incremental change, the company took a start-from-scratch approach, assembling an experienced team and transforming its infrastructure. Some want to go to a retail store and pay cash. [11] Western Unions footprint of retail locations gives it a worldwide laboratory for experimenting with blockchain applications. Were talking 30 percent, 40 percent, and, in some cases, deployments with a 70 percent return on capacity. Over the last two years, Singh has been accelerating Western Union's tech plan. Manufacturing, Information Services That support has made it a lot easier to have the influence we need to make the transformation successful. How would this improve our agility, the need to deliver great digital experiences at scale, and the desire to use low-code across the whole stackfront-end, integration, and back-end core systems., Western Union became an OutSystems customer in November 2020. Jaffin: We engaged with tech partners like Google almost immediately to refine our go-to-market strategy. 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. Jaffin: Digital was critical in a few ways. We serve all customer segments: from digital natives who are never without their smartphones to the 4 billion people on earth the World Bank estimates arent online yet., Western Union is strongly committed to migrants and to refugees: migration is at the heart of our business. How did you navigate those early moments? Harveer Singh, Chief Data Architect & Global Head of Engineering, reveals how the initiative will give the organisation the speed and agility it needs to . 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.. These strategies are paying off. The Western Union Way of digital transformation. He shares his views on digital transformation and economic opportunities for all. Poland followed later in 2022, while plans are at hand to launch Italy by the end of the year. Garden, The Economist As the transformation gets embedded into the organization, the businesses start to run their own agile deployments. 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. For decades, Western Union benefited from network effects as it added density and new geographies. The author approaches the problem using public. Western Union has the infrastructure to help make that a reality. Navigating complex land title issues would also leverage Western Unions existing capabilities of dealing with a range of government regulations. These are seismic factors currently redefining our world, earning their own epochal moniker: The Fourth Industrial Revolution. The strategy is also to reduce costs; on-prem infrastructure and people running it is expensive and you need back-ups of everything, especially in financial services. We will expand our Messenger bot to other countries and add other languages, he adds. Revenue from Western Union's digital money transfer services spiked from $600 million in 2019 to over $850 million in 2020. The EU is helping to boost Europe's digital capacities and create new opportunities for businesses and consumers while safeguarding basic rights. It took six months to do the bare minimum. Big data has helped Western Union merge data across multiple channels for years, for marketing and promotion, customer lifecycle management, compliance and fraud modeling. We continue to experiment with the technology and time will tell if it offers a better alternative to traditional rails.. Last year, the global-payment services giant completed 268 million consumer-to-consumer transactions worldwide, for a total of $80 billion. 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. Singh estimates that the project has reduced how much it spends on talking to its customers by a quarter, while markedly improving this critical function. 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. Start Time: 16:30 January 1, 0000 5:32 PM ETThe Western Union Company (NYSE:NYSE:WU)Q3 2022 Earnings Conference CallNovember 01, 2022, 16:30 PM ETCompany ParticipantsDevin McGranahan -. So its a real imperative across the top of the organization. Customers can send and receive money in a fast, reliable and convenient manner., We are proud to offer the same omnichannel choice in Austria. Key takeaways. New-found agility delivers growth and improved Customer Experience for partners and customers. Western Union Uses AWS to Create Company-Wide Digital Transformation. How do you start there and end up with a fully embedded transformation across a company of 12,000 people? Sector, Travel and 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. Over the last two years, Singh has been accelerating Western Union's tech plan. 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. A doctor in London taps an app on her phone to transfer 500 pounds. 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. Western Union's digital transformation efforts may fail to drive earnings growth, but they may be enough to keep earnings steady going forward. 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. Increasingly, digital technology and mobile devices play a key role in these transactions. 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. Not just front-end, but back office and our contact center. Reframe blockchain from a threat to an opportunity, by creating a new autonomous unit. In the same way that they say it takes a whole village to raise a child, it takes an army of people with the right skillsets and approaches to undertake a challenge like this. Last year, the global-payment services giant completed 268 million consumer-to-consumer transactions worldwide, for a total of $80 billion. 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 is Swamy Sivasubramaniyan, Head of Financial Services and Settlement Platform for Western Union, discussing the digital transformation experience with Infosys and Oracle. Why Do Companies Choose to Outsource Work? As the centerpiece of Western Unions omnichannel vision, the Western Union App is increasingly the primary touchpoint for customers: today more than 65% of Western Unions digital transactions originate on a mobile device globally. Services, High While Singh and his team have been occupied with the technology transformation taking place at Western Union, the breakneck speed at which the financial services and payments industry is changing means they also have to be planning for the longer-term. The Western Union Foundation is a separate charitable corporation that is tax-exempt under 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, contributions to which are tax-deductible for US income tax purposes. 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. There are 13 of these practices, and thats really how were assessing success with the transformation across the organization. Management, Digital Workplace Whats really nice about that is that its so visually obvious. 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. 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. Cortex, Infosys Denver, Colorado. Maybe it started out as more of a push, where we were looking to come in and work with a team. Snowflake: What are a few highlights of how Snowflake is helping with digital transformation? ", Looking back to why Western Union chose OutSystems, Tom says, We serve millions of customers in over 200 countries and territories, and we want to give them the best possible customer experience. The international roll-out continues to other countries at pace. The culture change has to be driven across teams to show how technology has enabled different and better outcomes. [5] 2017 Annual ReportCEO Letter (noting Western Union has expanded its fund payout network to billions of bank accounts). We caught up with Mazzaferro to dive deeper into how the Data Cloud enables ongoing digital transformation at Western Union: Snowflake: Tom, as CDIO you lead the charge on keeping Western Union at the forefront of data economy leadership. From the CEO down through his executive team, you see a real commitment to this transformation exercise and a real commitment to finding ways to optimize our processes, to get efficiencies, and to fund those investments that will drive topline revenue growth. Media, Madison Square 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. 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. Mazzaferro: Snowflake is enabling quite a bit around analytics, reporting, event triggers, and settlement across our card providers. Gartner Magic Quadrant for Low-Code Application Platforms, 2023. We go where our customers go, says Khalid Fellahi, senior vice president and general manager for Western Union Digital, based in San Francisco. Western Union powers your pursuit. And on our website, we added new support and wayfinding tools to ensure customers could quickly and easily access information. We have a lot of great ideas in terms of investments to drive that topline revenue growth, but we needed ways to fund those. 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. 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 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 . The company considers local preferences, as well, accepting about 10 payment methods, such as Apple Pay in the U.S. We scored ourselves as an organization on these market-shaper practices when we started the transformation in 2016. Society Updated: 01-06-2022 - 11:45. Reliable for over 170 years. Every year or two we rescore ourselves in a company-wide exercise to see where were making progress and where were falling behind. When we started the transformation project, we came at it from the perspective of this being a cultural transformation just as much as a process transformation. How Your Small Business Can Be Managed With The Right Databases, Why Businesses Must Focus on Introducing Technology in the Workplace. The central transformation team helps do the capability building in training those resources up, and then they run their own scaled-out deployment. On May 17, 2018, at the Digital Assembly in Sofia, Bulgaria, the European Commission launched the Digital Agenda for the Western Balkans. Knowledge Institute, Chemical Complete your profile for personalized recommendations, Managing Director, U.S. Financial Services at Google. In 2016, Western Union completed 268 million consumer-to-consumer transactions and 523 million business payments world-wide, moving more than $150 billion of principal for consumers and businesses. 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 . Inclusion, Bloomberg Western Union launched its digital banking app in Germany and Romania in Spring 2022, following 11 months of iterative development. 28+ active Western Union coupons, discount codes & coupon codes for June 2021. 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. Meridian, Infosys A large proportion of Western Unions infrastructure has been migrated to the cloud, and Singh reveals a timeline to complete the programme of work. One of our most important tools is the floor walk. 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. Most popular: Free $20 Amazon.com e-gift code for every friend you refer (earn up to $500). 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 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. January 25, 2019 | Video. 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. One moment later, in Shimla, a hill country city in India, close to the ridge of the Himalayan foothills, a cashier at the . Prior to implementing Snowflake in 2021, Western Unions data spanned 34 on-premises data warehouses, resulting in latency and operational burdens. We do that both in-line, so you as a manager go and visit your own organization, but also visit other functions. The digital transformation is helping Western Union emerge from a challenging two-year era. Microservices, Digital Process By using our services, you agree to our use of cookies. 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. Cole heads the 169-year-old company's digital transformation efforts, including the design and development of the software powering those consumer-facing platforms. Jay Jaffin was just starting his role as Western Union's chief marketing officer when the pandemic arrived. Leading fintech, Mambu, provides the platform and engine that drives the core of Western Union's new digital bank. That system is fine in a cash based economy, but is becoming increasingly cumbersome as digital payments take hold in emerging markets. Banco Santander Consumer Portugal Adopts OutSystems as its Digital Transformation Platform. Western Union and Beforepay Offer 'Send Now, Pay Later' Service to Consumers for International Money Transfers 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. Mohua is a marketing leader with over 15 years of experience in building and leading brands across industries. Salesforce has been such an important part of the digital experience journey.. Western Union is a global leader in cross-border, cross-currency money movement and payments. be to drive digital transformation and . The organisation was looking for somebody with a fresh perspective who could challenge the norms, bring people together to show them the value of what were doing and basically create an environment thats a little bit different to your usual corporate set-up. Cookies help us deliver our services. Huawei believes digital talent is a key driver in achieving digital transformation, solid economic growth, and better quality of life.
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