Western Union is a global leader in cross-border, cross-currency money movement and payments, namely it is now the second-largest money transfer provider in the world.
Automation Goals
As the operator of a global retail agent network consisting of hundreds of thousands of locations serving millions of customers around the globe every day, Western Union realized the potential of intelligent automation to improve productivity and increase operational efficiency across the business.
RPA Journey
Western Union has partnered with ISG Automation, one of the Blue Prism certified partners, since 2016 to launch and extend its global automation program, which today includes more than 120 automations that save the company more than 26,000 hours of manual work each month.
ISG Automation set up an Intelligent Automation Center of Excellence (CoE), initially delivering robotic process automation leveraging SS&C Blue Prism software, and then used its expertise to ensure that Western Union would be successful in building its own RPA software bots going forward by training more than 50 citizen developers to use a low-code development platform.
According to John Dyer, SVP and Head of Global Operations at Western Union, taking people who are tech-savvy and re-skilling them into intelligent automation developers has proven to be an extremely effective way of scaling enterprise-wide automation. As a result, Western Union has the right people creating the right automations while giving them the opportunity to create a new career path within the company.
Following the successful establishment of the CoE, ISG Automation helped Western Union add OCR to enhance the performance of its RPA bots. ISG has also assisted with discussions about future technology options as Western Union looks to continue its expansion into Intelligent Automation.
Benefits
According to Wayne Butterfield, a Partner of ISG Automation, Western Union is realizing a return on its automation investment of between three and six times its expenditure. According to Blue Prism, digital workers now process yearly more than five million tasks, across more than 120 different processes: in multiple areas such as finance, accounting, compliance, and operations.
