Today, Amazon Web Services announced that Western Union has selected AWS as its preferred long-term strategic cloud provider.
What's happening: Western Union plans to move a significant portion of its infrastructure to the cloud.
- With this move to AWS, Western Union will migrate from current datacenters to a microservices architecture, gaining the ability to build and support its applications, regardless of scale, load, or complexity.
- Western Union plans to use a mix of AWS machine learning, analytics, database, serverless, containers, and security services to update its current systems and products, and to build new cloud-native applications.
- AWS will enable Western Union to strengthen its money movement platform using Amazon PayCode, a new payment option available in 21 countries including the US, Chile, Colombia, Peru, the Philippines. With PayCode, shoppers can pay for their Amazon purchases in local currency, through Western Union’s network.
Western Union is in a multi-year process to digitize the 168 year old financial services firm.
- The money movement firm continues to look for ways to improve the customer experience over a variety of channels.
- Newer platforms like Currencycloud and TransferWise are gunning for Western Union's international payments business by partnering with banks to service their customers.
- AWS supports cloud services for financial firms like Liberty Mutual and Capital One.
“Our transition to the cloud will enable Western Union to expand our digital footprint and work more efficiently as we evolve to meet the needs of our business and customers. The elasticity and agility that AWS provides will enable us to transform the way we operate and become a cloud-first organization,” said Amit Sharma, chief information officer of Western Union.