Case Study—Western Union Managing Change

Western Union is the worldwide money transfer leader. It attained reputation by providing consumers with fast and convenient ways to send and receive money all around the world. As an aggressive company, Western Union’s strategy is to focus on growing its global consumer and payment business. In order to accomplish its global objectives, Christina Gold, the CEO of Western Union, had begun implementing a new organization structure. This new structure is expected to help company’s expansion and fit for company’s global operations.
The key point of Western Union’s change strategy is to change its focus on U.S. product line to regional structure with three main divisions. Under this strategy, the company’s operational structure, culture, marketing channels will be changed accordingly. In addition, how to handle the challenges and resistance of change will play an important role when company manages changes. In my opinion, having a regional structure is a wise way for companies which want global expansion. The reason is that regional structure allows each region to spend their time focusing on local customers’ needs and therefore company can provide excellent global service. In particularly, as a company in remittance market, mastering local situation and specific demands is an essential element to be succeeded.
After setting the strategy objectives, Western Union faced challenges of implementing. Western Union wants to develop a global brand; therefore, how to make sure that each agent will provide same standard of service will be a challenge for WU. In other words, how WU can act as an entity when having more than 365,000 Agent locations in over 200 countries and territories. Based on Gold’ point of view, Western Union shows its respect to different culture by creating a regional structure. On the other hand, as a company, each region should have common goals and share a lot of ideas. I agree with point of view because this point will help a global company make