In [] But you say its about more than technology? Transformation, Cyber Snowflake enables us to centralize our data and enable application and business processes to leverage it across the organization. Dan Nordlander, senior vice president of Western Union Way Operations at Western Union, discusses his companys unique transformation journey with McKinseys Barr Seitz. Western Union has gained a comprehensive view of the customer while running the Data Cloud on AWS. 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. Mohua Das Gupta - Head of Marketing, Tata CliQ. If any of these should fit what you're looking for, consider exploring a career with Western Union. [12]Josh Constine, Western Union Brings Money Transfer and Its Tricky Fees to Chat Apps, TechCrunch.com, Feb. 4, 2016. 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. 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. 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). Microservices, Digital Process ", Tom adds, In fast-moving customer-facing scenarios, development is never build-once-and-doneyoure always iterating to refine the customer experience. As mobile payments and blockchain tech challenge the status quo of cross-border money transfers, Western Union must digitally transform itself at the right pace or risk going the way of the telegraph. 8 (Managing the Strategy Development Process). These are seismic factors currently redefining our world, earning their own epochal moniker: The Fourth Industrial Revolution. Western Union's Customer Journey Digital Transformation Fueled by NICE - Innovative NICE Nexidia Customer Journey Optimisation provides powerful analytics to enhance customer experience. Arab Emirates. Driving Western Union's tech transformation - Digital Bulletin Increasingly, digital technology and mobile devices play a key role in these transactions. Behind those market-shaper practices are the lean tools and behaviors we develop and encourage. Increasingly, digital technology and mobile devices play a key role in these transactions. 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. While WU is considered a global leader in their space, competitive insights and . 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. Digital transformation in the EU | News | European Parliament This will enable the company to maintain its high . Maybe it started out as more of a push, where we were looking to come in and work with a team. So we had to figure out how to continue to show up for customers while also ensuring everyones health and safely. The Western Union Way of digital transformation. Cloud services such as cloud data platforms have become cost-efficient, high performance calling cards for any business that leverages big data. McKinsey's Kausik Rajgopal and Lang Davison recently sat down with Western Union's CEO to talk about its multicultural customer base (and . 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. Western Union now has more than 550,000 agent locations in more than 200 countries. Western Union can leverage such physical presence to win this new innovative space. Jaffin: Evolution meant expanding the ways in which customers experience the brand digitally. Management, Digital Workplace By using our services, you agree to our use of cookies. 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 . Western Union's digital transformation efforts may fail to drive earnings growth, but they may be enough to keep earnings steady going forward. UnionBank: Blazing Digital Trails in the Philippines and Beyond Finance. 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. I also agree with you that the competitive advantage of Western Union is a broad network of retail footprint across the world. 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. 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 . [1] The first transcontinental telegraph was sent on October 24, 1861, from the Chief Justice of California to President Abraham Lincoln. Last year, the global-payment services giant completed 268 million consumer-to-consumer transactions worldwide, for a total of $80 billion. Theyve complemented each other really well and been able to almost mentor each other, as well as building great relationships with the product groups. Because if you dont have the right data, your applications will struggle to provide the right business outcomes and customer experiences. Manufacturing, Communication Western Union International Bank is licensed by the Austrian Financial Market Authority. Cortex, Infosys 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. 22 Companies Spearheading Digital Innovation in Their Industries in | Learn more about Rokas kudas's work experience, education, connections & more by visiting their profile on . Western Union Careers It is our responsibility to enable businesses, problem solvers, regulators and communities to leverage fintech for the betterment of lives. However, Western Union would be wise to form a new, separate unit for exploring blockchain services. 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. The reason for that is due to the huge increase in demand for our digital services as lockdowns were implemented across many different geographies. Engaged in problem resolution of complex . Mohua is a marketing leader with over 15 years of experience in building and leading brands across industries. This is a powerful tool for our business and one of the key capabilities of our new infrastructure.. today more than 65% of Western Union's digital transactions originate on a mobile . 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. Youre starting to see that happen culturally. 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. Snowflake: What do you see changing now that your organization is better able to share data? Technology powers the data economy. Western Union hiring Global Head, Customer Experience & Design in Top retailers use AI-powered campaigns to engage their most valuable customers. 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. Salesforce has a value proposition that was immediately interesting because it allows you to build a single omnichannel journey that can be managed really efficiently when I want to make a change I only need to do so in one place. Revenue from Western Union's digital money transfer services spiked from $600 million in 2019 to over $850 million in 2020. Singh also sees huge potential in the use of blockchain for specific use cases within financial services and payments, for example, helping with the Know Your Customer (KYC) process that is important to stopping money laundering and fraud and eliminating many of the checks that currently hold up cross-border payments. Business Application Services, Service Experience [7]For a helpful overview of how Blockchain is being used in emerging markets, see Vinay Gupta & Rob Knight, How Blockchain Could Help Emerging Markets Leap Ahead, Harvard Business Review, May 17, 2017. 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. Its not done from the perspective of correction or a negative consequence. 2023 MWC Huawei Digital Leadership Seminar: Connecting Global Wisdom One of our most important tools is the floor walk. 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. Think of Western Union, and its yellow placard advertising an agent location comes to mind. When people send money to friends or family across the country or around the world, chances are good that Western Union is involved. Hiring experienced developers was already hard, and the skills drought got even worse with the great resignation. . They can include creating strategy placemats (one-page strategy overviews that are easily shared), frequent team huddles, one-on-one coaching, and process confirmation. For example, helping African countries develop official land registers could eliminate a huge barrier to investment and capital inflows (e.g., by resolving uncertain and disputed land titles). Every year or two we rescore ourselves in a company-wide exercise to see where were making progress and where were falling behind. Nov 2011 - Present11 years 5 months. 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. People who knew how a team or a group worked before can come in and see its night-and-day different. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Want to learn more about technology and organizations? Group, Infosys Revenue Management Platform for Banking, About Country/region, Costa W ith the outbreak of a crippling global pandemic and a pronounced global economic slowdown, the last few years have been rather tumultuous for the world. And if Western Union doesnt embrace and transform along with those technologies, it will fade away just like the telegraph. Leaders across many industries and companies of all sizes report that one of their biggest challenges is siloed data. Western Union will likely face internal resistance from three sources. 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. Prior to implementing Snowflake in 2021, Western Unions data spanned 34 on-premises data warehouses, resulting in latency and operational burdens. We go where our customers go, says Khalid Fellahi, senior vice president and general manager for Western Union Digital, based in San Francisco. Salesforce has been such an important part of the digital experience journey.. Working across many cultures at Western Union | McKinsey The transformation of a legacy company whose roots lie in the era of the telegraph involves more than just lean deployments and agile methodologies. In the past five years, theres been a leveling across applications and data. [9]Western Union recently dipped its toes into blockchain. It requires a change in process and culture, the adoption of a common lingo, executive buy-in, and a center of excellence to ensure enterprise-wide success. A lot of our big data environment is still on-prem and the mission is to move that completely to the cloud by the end of the year. [8]David Thomas, Beyond the Hype: What Blockchain could mean for Africa, African Business Magazine, Feb. 26, 2018. She has extensive experience in leading strategic marketing and has worked with brands like Myntra, Arrow, and Amante. How did you evolve for digital convenience and safety? Deep divides in digital connectivity, internet use, and access remain. We know there are certain systems that we cannot just move to the cloud straight away such as the AS400 IBM mainframe, but weve managed to take the ecosystem that surrounds our legacy technology and move it to the cloud and we think we can get everything to the cloud before the end of the year. We wanted plug-and-play convenience to integrate any technology.. What does "digital transformation" mean to Western Union? So well go from maybe four pilot teams to a plan to scale out across 400 people and maybe 30 teams next year. Now data is the driver and applications are being developed to handle that data and represent it to business stakeholders to make it consumable. Something we could take forward is a digital dollar, which we could make transferable all around the world with our vendors. ; With the solution, Western Union launched a state-of-the-art digital . These are things like rewards and recognition, top-down innovation, and consequence management. Whats really nice about that is that its so visually obvious. Some development teams suffer 100 percent attrition in two to three years., "OutSystems helps in many ways. Manufacturing, Information Services Most popular: Free $20 Amazon.com e-gift code for every friend you refer (earn up to $500).