Straight Talk Special Issue: Financial Services - 27

27
technology, that's where I'm focusing many of
our new solutions.
In April, we introduced WU EDGE, a digital
platform that enables small and mediumsized enterprises to trade internationally with
confidence and ease. Business customers who
want to enable cross-border payments can
plug WU EDGE right into their existing financial
platforms to initiate and manage cross-border
payments. Banks that are de-risking and getting
out of the cross-border transaction space are
coming to us to white label our cross-border
payment service.
Last October, we launched WU Connect, a
platform that integrates with leading consumer
messaging and social media platforms. The
API-based platform enables third-party digital
applications to integrate with us to provide
global money transfer experience to their users.
We've signed contracts with Viber and WeChat
and have a healthy pipeline of social media
and messaging platforms who'd like to use
WU Connect to offer financial services to their
customers but don't want to take on the risk.
These kinds of platform-based innovations are
increasingly important to our business. We've
been able to take these capabilities that we've
built for ourselves and provide them to other
organizations.
These are capabilities that we've developed
internally and we're at a stage where external
companies are willing to pay us for them. It's
bringing new clients and revenues into the
company. It's particularly exciting to see these
innovations take on a life of their own outside
Western Union.

The Business Value
of the CIO
Having spent a good portion of my career in
technology companies, I've worked with some
of the brightest engineers in the world. They
truly know their craft.
But the benefit that a CIO can bring to those
companies-and any company-is figuring
out how to apply technology and innovation
to a business problem. I've always seen that
as my role. And that's enabled me to not
only be a great technology consultant to the
business, but a great business consultant to the
engineering teams.
In order to provide that value as a CIO, you have
to go very broad. You must spend a lot of time
to understand the many different areas of the
business. If I'm going to evaluate a marketing
tool, I have to understand marketing in order
to accurately convey the value of that tool to
the CMO. If I'm looking at financial tools, I have
to have a conversation with the CFO about
financial reporting. Even in IT operations, I must
understand the tools that can make my own
engine run better. And so you have to spend
a lot of time across the entire portfolio of
technology.
Sure, the engineers will tell you no one
understands technology better than they do.
And that's fine. That's not an insult to the CIO.
But the CIO can take that technology and figure
out how to make that technology work to solve
a business problem. If you're not focused on
that, you'll very quickly be put in a box and
you'll never have a seat at the table. It's critical
for the CIO to be a business executive and also
be able to run the technology function. The job
keeps getting bigger and bigger. But it's also
getting more exciting as a result. I've been in
this role for 20 years, and I can see another 20
years ahead of me.



Straight Talk Special Issue: Financial Services

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Straight Talk Special Issue: Financial Services

Contents
Straight Talk Special Issue: Financial Services - Cover1
Straight Talk Special Issue: Financial Services - Cover2
Straight Talk Special Issue: Financial Services - 1
Straight Talk Special Issue: Financial Services - Contents
Straight Talk Special Issue: Financial Services - 3
Straight Talk Special Issue: Financial Services - 4
Straight Talk Special Issue: Financial Services - 5
Straight Talk Special Issue: Financial Services - 6
Straight Talk Special Issue: Financial Services - 7
Straight Talk Special Issue: Financial Services - 8
Straight Talk Special Issue: Financial Services - 9
Straight Talk Special Issue: Financial Services - 10
Straight Talk Special Issue: Financial Services - 11
Straight Talk Special Issue: Financial Services - 12
Straight Talk Special Issue: Financial Services - 13
Straight Talk Special Issue: Financial Services - 14
Straight Talk Special Issue: Financial Services - 15
Straight Talk Special Issue: Financial Services - 16
Straight Talk Special Issue: Financial Services - 17
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Straight Talk Special Issue: Financial Services - 19
Straight Talk Special Issue: Financial Services - 20
Straight Talk Special Issue: Financial Services - 21
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Straight Talk Special Issue: Financial Services - 24
Straight Talk Special Issue: Financial Services - 25
Straight Talk Special Issue: Financial Services - 26
Straight Talk Special Issue: Financial Services - 27
Straight Talk Special Issue: Financial Services - 28
Straight Talk Special Issue: Financial Services - 29
Straight Talk Special Issue: Financial Services - 30
Straight Talk Special Issue: Financial Services - 31
Straight Talk Special Issue: Financial Services - 32
Straight Talk Special Issue: Financial Services - 33
Straight Talk Special Issue: Financial Services - 34
Straight Talk Special Issue: Financial Services - 35
Straight Talk Special Issue: Financial Services - 36
Straight Talk Special Issue: Financial Services - Cover3
Straight Talk Special Issue: Financial Services - Cover4
https://magazine.straighttalkonline.com/hi_tech
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https://magazine.straighttalkonline.com/assetheavy2020
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https://magazine.straighttalkonline.com/womenintech2
https://magazine.straighttalkonline.com/financialservices2019/
https://magazine.straighttalkonline.com/issue11
https://magazine.straighttalkonline.com/issue10
https://magazine.straighttalkonline.com/issue9
https://magazine.straighttalkonline.com/womeninit
https://magazine.straighttalkonline.com/financialservices
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https://magazine.straighttalkonline.com/issue7
https://magazine.straighttalkonline.com/issue6
https://magazine.straighttalkonline.com/issue5
https://magazine.straighttalkonline.com/issue4
https://magazine.straighttalkonline.com/issue3
https://magazine.straighttalkonline.com/issue2
https://magazine.straighttalkonline.com/issue1
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