“We will continue to be proactive—anticipating, adapting to and addressing the ever-changing needs of our customers, always striving to stay one step ahead.”
Hikmet Ersek
Business Need
- Western Union has built significant scale in the money transfer business with 242 million consumer-to-consumer transactions and 459 million business payments in 2013 alone.
- The company is transforming and focusing on developing an omni-channel approach that includes retail, web and mobile.
- The company faces increasing competitive pressure from emerging technology players.
- Western Union wants to expand into new markets with e-commerce and other digital products with a goal of reaching customers with a more tailored and personalized experience.
Challenges
- In 2013, Western Union processed more than 29 transactions per second, on average, which generated a significant amount of structured and unstructured data that must be integrated from diverse sources (legacy, mobile and online data).
- Data scientists must rely upon the data platform to conduct statistical modeling and predictive analysis, systematically noting trends in sending and receiving behaviors.
- The company needs to cost-effectively deal with this data complexity, while simultaneously scaling access, storage, and processing.
Solutions & Results
- Western Union built a data platform based on Hadoop (Cloudera) and Informatica Big Data Edition for Hadoop.
- Western Union is one of a handful of very early adopters of Hadoop on such a global scale.
Products & Services
Informatica Big Data Edition
Provides a safe, efficient way to integrate all types of data on Hadoop at any scale without having to learn Hadoop.
Informatica Professional Services
Provides a full range of professional services based on Informatica’s proven implementation methodology.
Informatica Global Customer Support
Provides your organization with the support you need, where and how you need it: choose from Standard, Enterprise or Mission-Critical Support.
Informatica Address Verification
Parses, cleanses, verifies & standardizes global address data and appends country codes for global address validation.
