When Nick Masterson-Jones took on the role of chief information officer for Travelex Global Business Payments (TGBP) in January 2011, he was thrown into an acquisition process that was just commencing. Although an acquisition was likely, he says he did not know who the buyer would be. Later that year, financial services and communications company, Western Union, bought the business-to-business unit of foreign exchange and payments provider Travelex.
Since then and throughout 2012, the focus has been on integrating TGBP into Western Union, creating Western Union Business Solutions (WUBS), while 2013 will be about bringing out new products, he says.
The making of WUBS
When Mr Masterson-Jones was offered the role of CIO for WUBS after the acquisition, he says he jumped at the opportunity. “I was very excited by the vision that Western Union had, and has, for the business-to-business division.”
Exciting it may have been, but as with any merger, technical discrepancies needed ironing out. There were the trivial challenges such as making the company directories consistent. As a UK company, Travelex listed names by surname, whereas US-based Western Union listed names by first name. It may seem trivial, but “if you don’t deal with these details, you extend the period in which people don’t feel they are one team,” he says.
On an engineering level, he and his team decided to separate TGBP from Travelex first, then start the merger process into Western Union. They did so by initially setting up a new network for TGBP that would connect its local systems worldwide.
As the name implies, WUBS is dedicated to small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and other firms in the business-to-business space. While SMEs make up a large bulk of the company's 100,000 business customers worldwide, they are not the sole target market. “SMEs are often under-served and don’t have access to the types of financial products and services that multinational corporations, for example, use day to day. We are trying to change that.”
WUBS is also developing products for non-governmental organisations as well as organisations in the education sector, law firms and financial institutions. “This is in line with product enhancements to our GlobalPay Platform to support them and give them access to intuitive and sophisticated cash management tools,” he says.
WUBS is working with larger companies and service providers, for example, in the pensions and payroll space, to distribute funds around the world as effectively and efficiently as possible. Using its propriety network, WUBS can make local currency payments in more than 70 countries. “This is a really attractive offering as it can lead to significant cost and operational savings.”
“Two-thousand and eleven to 2012 was all about the integration and becoming more efficient,” says Mr Masterson-Jones. “This year is about an external focus and bringing out more products.”
Seen it all before
Mr Masterson-Jones is no stranger to system renewals. He oversaw two big changes to the payments systems in the UK over the past decade: the regeneration of the Bankers' Automated Clearing Services (BACS) payments clearing system and the development of the real-time Faster Payment system.
Until 10 years ago, his brush with the payments industry was limited to strategy work that he undertook at SWIFT. With a career background in IT and risk management, he then dived into payments when he became programme director for the infrastructure renewable programme at the UK’s automated clearing service BACS.
BACS was working through a complete renewal of the infrastructure that underpins the clearing system in the UK, through which almost all social welfare payments and salaries, as well as UK direct debits and standing orders, are processed.
So a new platform had to be a big-bang implementation, and provide absolute certainty everything would work on the day, Mr Masterson-Jones says.
“We just had to push a button one day and it had to work,” he says. Not taking any chances, he brought in software academics from the safety industry who had experience assessing nuclear power stations.
“These were primarily a team of academics who brought mathematic modelling techniques to help us quantify whether we were right to be confident – these were techniques created in industries such as military equipment and air traffic control, where system failure can lead to a loss of life,” says Mr Masterson-Jones. “I wanted that same rigour applied to the replacement of the BACS system.”
In 2003, he took over the development of the real-time Faster Payments system in the UK, a role that came with new challenges. “As we were building the core centre for Faster Payments, banks were changing their own technology, so this required a lot of testing.”
Although the business requirements were different for the BACS update, Faster Payments and his work at Travelex, Mr Masterson-Jones says the security and reliability needs for payments are the same.
“When one is entrusted to deal with payments, the expectation is excellent execution,” he says.
