Furthermore, a chain of retail outlets is expensive. McKinsey's Kausik Rajgopal and Lang Davison recently sat down with Western Union's CEO to talk about its multicultural customer base (and . Navigating complex land title issues would also leverage Western Unions existing capabilities of dealing with a range of government regulations. 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. Secure, touchless, digital money transfers were a safe, reliable way for people to send funds where they needed to, so we leaned in there. . 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. Specifically,. Western Union must adapt to an increasingly mobile world: if Western Union doesn't develop low-cost mobile money transfers, Western Union won't be able to compete . We built the Western Union Way team, or the WU Way team as we call it, with ten high-potential individuals from around the company. 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. Board of Directors. Western Union Google Pay Integration: Interview With Vice - Monito 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. Most popular: Free $20 Amazon.com e-gift code for every friend you refer (earn up to $500). Discover how Santander Consumer Finance replaced 70% of their core IT systems in three years with OutSystems. 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. UnionBank: Blazing Digital Trails in the Philippines and Beyond arrow_forward. Western Union Digital Banking is offered by Western Union International Bank GmbH. 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. To accelerate application development, improve agility, and provide great digital experiences, the company chose OutSystems as its high-performance low-code platform. Although retail business declined during . We started function by function, looking at individual deployments across our different groups in the company. In 2011, Western Union opened an office in San Francisco to ramp up its digital operation. People are asking us, Hey, can you come help me? 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.. Huawei believes digital talent is a key driver in achieving digital transformation, solid economic growth, and better quality of life. 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. Provide value consistently every month and deliver new value and capabilities. OutSystems provides the innovation and agility to accelerate the digital transformation of Western Union. Receive rewards. 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. Jay Jaffin was just starting his role as Western Union's chief marketing officer when the pandemic arrived. Western Union: Reimagining a Financial Services Leader 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. Procurement & Construction, Financial . Think of Western Union, and its yellow placard advertising an agent location comes to mind. Western Union's platform provides seamless cross-border flows and its leading global financial network bridges more than 200 countries and territories and over 130 currencies . 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. 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.. Deloitte Collaborates With AWS to Put Enterprise-Class Banking Leadership. 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. Business Application Services, Service Experience 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. [5]. The author approaches the problem using public. Youre now a year into your role as CMO and leading through a prolonged global crisis. We set up virtual war rooms, met with our executive team daily to strategize, and spoke to customers every week to keep a pulse on their needs. Industry experts were also drafted in to create the army that was required for this technology mission. Think of Western Union, and its yellow placard advertising an agent location comes to mind. Really understand the business stakeholders problem and how you can fix or enable it. 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. Team members were drawn from different continents and operating on different time zones. Analytics, API 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. Jaffin: Its important for us to continue trying new technology that gets us closer to customers and their changing needs, like advanced analytics and other tools. Jay Jaffin was just starting his role as Western Unions chief marketing officer when the pandemic arrived. The reason for that is due to the huge increase in demand for our digital services as lockdowns were implemented across many different geographies. 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. Sector, Travel and 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. This seems to be a typical BSSE case in which it is hard for the incumbent to disrupt its business, since the innovation may threaten the current profitable business. Cortex, Infosys Wingspan, Infosys 12. Gartner Magic Quadrant for Low-Code Application Platforms, 2023. Western Union Careers [1] The first transcontinental telegraph was sent on October 24, 1861, from the Chief Justice of California to President Abraham Lincoln. With OutSystems, we deploy twice every week. 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. These strategies are paying off. . 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. Introducing the next-generation operating model, Winning with your talent-management strategy. Over the last two years, Singh has been accelerating Western Union's tech plan. Its not done from the perspective of correction or a negative consequence. 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. 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. What we are talking about is not cryptocurrency, it is not something that has to be mined. [1] One hundred years later, Western Union launched the first domestic commercial geostationary satellite (Westar 1). While WU is considered a global leader in their space, competitive insights and . But for all its success, Western Union is undoubtedly a legacy player in a market that has been truly disrupted in recent years, with smaller and more agile outfits making waves in the increasingly digitised payments space. Specifically, how Data, Editors note: This is part of a series of blogs about the data economy.