Western Union Selects AWS as Preferred Long-Term Strategic Cloud Provider

Global leader in cross-border, cross-currency money movement and payments uses AWS’s unmatched breadth of functionality, performance, and global infrastructure to support its digital transformation

SEATTLE–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced that Western Union (NYSE: WU) has selected AWS as preferred long-term strategic cloud provider, as it plans to move a significant portion of its infrastructure to the cloud. Western Union will be using AWS to build a more seamless and reliable experience for its customers who send money and payments to over 200 countries and territories through its mobile application, website, and agent locations around the globe. 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.

AWS’s highly performant infrastructure and security tools, delivering an unmatched set of cloud services, gives Western Union the means to quickly innovate on its global money movement platform. Western Union plans to use a mix of AWS machine learning, analytics, database, serverless, containers, and security services to update its systems and products, as well as build new cloud-native applications. One key objective of the company’s cloud-first strategy is to leverage AWS machine learning and analytics services to automate business operations and build self-healing capabilities into its money transfer platform. Western Union also intends to leverage Amazon Aurora and Amazon DynamoDB databases, AWS’s fully managed databases built for the cloud, to increase financial transaction throughput, speed payment processing, and transfer money with higher performance.

“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, Western Union. “For example, adopting AWS will enable us to further develop and strengthen our money movement platform to support innovation like Amazon PayCode, a new payment option available in 21 countries and territories including the US, Chile, Colombia, Peru, the Philippines, Thailand, Jamaica, and Kenya, among others, where shoppers can pay for their Amazon purchases in local currency, through Western Union’s network. This omnichannel platform is just one of the strategic initiatives we will move forward with using the scalability and functionality of AWS to innovate.”

“Financial services organizations around the world are turning to AWS, leveraging the breadth and depth of our services to drive innovation, increase agility, and analyze vast amounts of data to enable better decisions around customer segmentation, pricing, and product development. Already a leader in international money transfers, Western Union is not content to stand still, so they are working with AWS to drive even more business advantage in this highly competitive, and increasingly digital, industry,” said Mike Clayville, Vice President, Worldwide Commercial Sales at AWS, Inc. “By choosing AWS, the 168 years young iconic brand is modernizing its infrastructure network, enabling the adoption of new technologies and payment channels, while making it easy for consumers and businesses to send and receive money, as well as make payments, quickly and reliably.”

About Amazon Web Services

For 13 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 165 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 69 Availability Zones (AZs) within 22 geographic regions, with announced plans for 13 more Availability Zones and four more AWS Regions in Indonesia, Italy, South Africa, and Spain. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.

About Amazon

Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.

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