WESTERN UNION
SETTLEMENT TRANSFORMATION PROJECT
ABOUT CUSTOMER: The Western Union Company is an American worldwide financial services and communications company, which serves more than 50.000 users, including businesses of all sizes, financial and educational institutions, and NGOs with Cross-Border Payments, Risk Management, and Cash Management Solutions.
Western Union combines:
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the required licensing for funds moving across borders;
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a pay-in network that includes both retail locations and digital and account payouts;
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a settlement mechanism that interacts with all these pay-in locations and calculates currency conversions on both the send and receive ends;
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and tracking and risk-assessment technology to support compliance with local regulations — to create the ONE truly global money mover.
BUSINESS
NEEDS
CHALLENGES: Western Union initiated Settlement Transformation Project to implement a new IT solution for a major part of the company’s daily back-office functions. It is driven by these main business needs:
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To ensure effectiveness and quality in daily operations;
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To minimize manual activities;
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To deploy applications that are well adapted to business in a fast-changing environment.
ACTIVITIES CARRIED OUT
As a part of Settlement Transformation Project four new applications were created to cover these functions:
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Business customers (agents) setup;
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Transaction feed management, commission processing;
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Amounts payable/receivable;
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Funding and collection;
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Billing;
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Reconciliation;
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Sub-leger accounting;
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Internal and external reporting.
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Addendum provided business and technical expertise and executed activities described hereinafter to help Western Union to deliver the Settlement Transformation Project under the expected schedule and quality.
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Analysis and design: defining and documenting business and technical requirements; participation in defining solution architecture, interfaces, data mapping.
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Testing: writing test cases and creating mock-ups; defining data needs to support testing activities; participation in user acceptance testing, regression testing, parallel testing.
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Project delivery: working with the project delivery team to plan upcoming activities, define goals and metrics; monitoring and reporting progress on defined metrics; the escalation of risks, or issues.
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Other support: preparing user training material; working closely with users during roll-out to transfer knowledge; documentation of system configuration and execution of configuration activities; participation in activities for data conversion and transition from legacy to new applications, executing data quality checks.
BUSINESS
OUTCOMES
Several new applications were created as part of Settlement Transformation Project ensuring benefits to Western Union:
This project HELPS CUT ON COSTS: ​
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A considerable amount of manual activities shall be suspended and automated.
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Daily back-office operations can be carried effectively, and quality can be easily monitored.
NEW IT INFRASTRUCTURE ENSURES SYSTEM'S SCALABILITY, ADAPTABILITY, AND BUSINESS CONTINUITY.
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New applications are based on up-to-date technologies and comply with the company’s IT infrastructure to ensure easy maintenance.
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New applications comply with current business needs and can be modified when needed