How a 165-year-old company is at the forefront of digital business | #MME16 by Gabriel Pesek | Apr 29, 2016 At this year’s Oracle Modern Marketing Experience, companies that have traditionally been seen as belonging to the analog era are getting a chance to update themselves in the eyes of customers and their peers, while also capitalizing on the business experience of their long histories. Nick Cerise, CMO of Western Union Business Solutions, sat down with John Furrier (@furrier) and Peter Burris (@plburris), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, to talk about how Western Union is striving to earn its modernized image, some of the troubles for customers doing international money transfers, and how bringing buyers and sellers together helps benefit the company. Digitizing the old Despite Western Union’s 165 years of existence, Cerise said, “We’re a digital business at heart.” Going into further detail, he highlighted three points of the business’ digital agility in modern markets: “We’re distributing technology to 500,000 agent locations around the globe. So number one, obviously, we’re global; number two, we have great scale … ; and number three, we’re fast.” Cerise also gave some focus to a new platform being put into use by Western Union, intended for intranational and international transactions. “We’ve launched in April a financial technology platform called Edge,” he said. “Edge is a new way in which we are connecting buyers and sellers, empowering them with data and analytics and data-visualization, and enabling growth, because we can actually enable a near-real-time payment across 22 currencies.” Connections and capabilities Having established the modern stance of Western Union, Cerise gave more detail on how the company tries to enable their customers with that technology. He explained that when the company moves into a new market, it tries to provide users the technology that allows them to connect, as a buyer or a supplier, in one single platform. “We believe that when money moves, lives improve, and the economy gets better,” he said. However, Cerise also recognized that “there’s a reappraisal of our brand that has to happen,” and while there would certainly be challenges in making that reappraisal a positive one with all of its strengths evident, he felt Western Union was up to it, thanks to its market and tech strategies. “The way that we’ve gone to market, historically, has very much been … target a buyer, target an importer,” he explained. “And now what we’re looking to do is create a platform that adds value to a business relationship, [with] trusted buyers and sellers. And when you’re doing that, you’re actually oftentimes looking at network values and bringing in an exporter who may not be actually where our economics or our monetization model drives us, but bringing them to the network, bringing them onto our platform, drives more incremental value.” By building these connections, Cerise said, Western Union is helping to develop its own capabilities as well. “Connecting those buyers and sellers, and enabling them to actually participate on the platform in a way that … we’ve integrated our marketing capability, so we are able to then automate, to drive triggers on the customer transaction platform.”