PODCAST | Western Union, CDO: Cross-Functional Teams Drive Holistic Products and Solutions for Customers

Nick Halsey: Hello, and welcome back to CDO Magazine tech talks. I'm Nick Halsey, CEO of Akira, and with me for our second segment is Tom Mazzaferro, Chief Data Officer at Western Union. 

Tom, I wanted to talk a little bit about Western Union and some of the data strategies and opportunities you're pursuing there. Maybe you could start by just reminding people about all of the things that Western Union does, because I think we have an outdated notion that this is a telegraph company. In fact, I think it's a mobile financial services company. So, tell us a little bit about the lines of business, of which you're a supervisor.

Tom Mazzaferro: Sure. So, a few things to kind of give you the overall view of Western Union:  Number one is we are truly a global company, as we operate in 200 different countries and territories across the world. On top of that, we have over 550,000 agent locations — retail locations that we,  as a service, provide the ability for people to come in to either send money or receive money — across the world.

We talked before about the services and products of Western Union. There really are two major businesses that we have. We have our customer money transfer business, which supports millions of customers on  an annual basis. And then we have our Western Union business solutions, which is basically providing payment services for small businesses or corporations. 

We also have our Western Union International Bank, which actually is positioned in Austria, that is supporting the two other business lines, both CMT and Washington Eden business solutions. It has its own branches as well across Europe. So, we really have three different business lines. 

Halsey: That's an amazing and widely distributed infrastructure globally. I can  imagine the challenges around supporting that kind of a distributed operation across three lines of business are pretty daunting. How big are the IT and data teams that work there?

Mazzaferro: The data team today is around 70 employees, but we also have quite a few third parties supporting us as well. So, it’s about a 300-person team, including our third party supporting the actual data organization across the larger IT division. We have a few thousand people that are currently supporting it.

When you think about what we put in place here with the automation, and the capabilities supporting 200 plus countries and millions of customers — corporations as well as consumers — we actually have a pretty streamlined and efficient organization. We look at what we could do as a whole of 11,000 employees. But in turn, we actually provide services to all these countries, all of these customers, and enable them to basically live and transfer money to their friends and family and, for emergencies, to support their everyday lives. 

Halsey: That's very impressive. Have you been able to standardize your infrastructure that spans the globe, or have you had to regionalize the operations depending on where the business is?

Mazzaferro: We do have a few different regional operations. We have an operation that supports the Western Union International Bank in Austria. And we have one that supports our Russian operations just due to some of the laws and regulations supporting that. Outside of those two, though, we actually have standardized across the large majority of other countries going from a resource standpoint and from a support standpoint.

From a technology standpoint, on the platform side, we actually do have quite a few different platforms that we actually are now in the process of modernizing and rationalizing to the cloud. But as mentioned in the first segment, we also have some obvious data regulations that require certain platforms to be domiciled in those countries, so we still need to make sure that we may have to support those regulations and also support those customers in those countries.

Halsey: I see that you joined Western Union in February of this year. I'm sure it's been quite a learning curve. I'm curious — what was the most surprising aspect of the IT and data architecture when you started to learn about the business?

Mazzaferro: Two things actually surprised me, and the first one was the culture. The culture is amazing. It  is a great culture for a great company, very welcoming, and everyone's focused on doing the right thing for the customer. That was just fabulous to me. 

Number two was around your point — the architecture and the platforms. Over the years they built some great things resulting in millions of customers across all these countries. But as part of that, as technology in the industry has modernized, there's an opportunity here to make things even more efficient and more effective and more automated to provide even better customer experience going forward. 

I think the piece that really surprised me the most was the teams and the people with their openness to understanding how we can actually enhance and modernize things even more to provide even better customer experience across the world.

Halsey: OK. And when you came in, was there a specific, major transformational project that was the key charter for you as you came on board?

Mazzaferro: There are a few large-scale enterprise programs that are already underway that, obviously, the data team is plugged into and obviously supporting. We also have kicked off a few on our own to further transform the company going forward. One thing that we truly will do across the company is to have these cross-functional teams, where we have teams from other IT software delivery teams, the data team, and the business teams all coming together to really drive a holistic-based product and solution that service our customers going forward.

As part of these large-scale transformation efforts, the thing we focus on is bringing the right people and the right skill sets and the right teams together to really drive the best solution going forward. 

Halsey: You came from a banking background; you had  major roles for a number of years at JPMorgan Chase, and HSBC. Western Union, as we've talked about, is also a financial services Institution, but not quite the same as a global bank. What is similar and different between the two environments? 

Mazzaferro: I think number one, it's the scale. I thought JPMorgan Chase and HSBC were big. But if we're thinking about the scale and the number of customers, Western Union has 3X scale. So, that to me was an eye opener — how do we make sure that we really support and really build solutions to support the globe? Number two was realizing there are great opportunities here to service and to support our customers going forward with other products and other partners.

One of the things we did, for example, was launch a partnership with AXA offering insurance products to our customers. We're also looking at how we can provide other financial services, or other products, from partnering with other companies to really enrich our customer's experiences and their lives going forward. There's a great opportunity, as everything that we've been targeting to do here is around how we can best service our customers and our processes in the future. 

Halsey: This is something we hear from a number of the CEOs we interview — that they're starting to play offense around data; they're starting to build new products and services that can extend the lines of business in the industry. And I think most people start out on the defense side, playing defense around regulatory compliance. They want to make sure that security and compliance are job number one. But once they get that taken care of they can start to get creative. Can you talk a little bit about that balance at Western Union, and what kinds of new products and services you have been able to, or think you can, bring to market?

Mazzaferro: Sure. Our first priority is security and making sure that our customers are safe and secure as they operate. That is by far our first priority right now. And as we go forward and put that in place, there's a whole slew of things that we can do using data and using technology to better improve our customers’ experience, the services that we offer them, and the products that we offer them. If you look at things in two different directions, in two different pieces, there are internal products that we can build to actually support our employees, and our business lines to better service and better support those customers.

We built things with finance and accounting to better support the reconciliation processes. We built things within our business lines to better support their marketing, their campaigns and their customers. You  also can create products providing customers with better access to their information, better ideas of what their transactions were, what their engagements were with us, and so forth. All those things start coming to bear, and there's a whole lot more we can do. This is just the start. 

Halsey:  That's fascinating, Tom! Let's wrap up this session for now, but when we come back for our third segment, I'd like to dig into some of the technology and infrastructure that you're using to build those new products and the extent to which you're using big data or analytics or machine learning to help drive some of that work. Great to talk to you today, Tom. Thanks so much.

Mazzaferro: Thank you so much for having me.