Western Union
Background
Multinational financial services company Western Union has been helping customers send information and funds since 1851. Described in 2006 by The New York Times as “the world’s largest money-transfer business,” Western Union has since acquired multiple money transfer companies and remained a premier financial services organization.
Challenges
With a robust business presence in 200 countries around the world, Western Union is tasked to comply with multiple data compliance regulations—from GDPR and CCPA to multiple local and regional mandates—to keep customer data secure. A review of their data foundation uncovered inefficient processes that were highly manual. “We were spending way too much time on trying to figure out where our customer data exists, is it safe, is it secure, is it masked,” said Harveer Singh, Chief Data Architect and Global Head of Engineering at Western Union.
[PKWARE] was a perfect match for us, with the ability to scale globally and solve different use cases, providing us with the insights and capabilities to manage our data going forward.
Thomas Mazzaferro, Chief Data Officer
Use Cases
The search for the right solution led the Western Union team to assess multiple partners and solutions. With the help of Quant Systems, Western Union found PKWARE’s PK Protect solution, a robust and automated data discovery and remediation solution.
“We went through a process to understand the capabilities of PKWARE, who they’ve partnered with and what they could build and deploy and solve for us,” remarked Thomas Mazzaferro, Chief Data Officer for Western Union. “Ultimately, it was a perfect match for us, with the ability to scale globally and solve different use cases, providing us with the insights and capabilities to manage our data going forward.”
During the POC, Western Union was able to use PK Protect to automate data discovery and detection, leveraging the ability to create data tags, scan across priority systems, and identify PII data. This use case is in process of being broadened across the entire Western Union data landscape while the team continues to identify future use cases for leveraging PK Protect capabilities including masking and encryption.
Results
Using PK Protect, the team at Western Union has identified and prioritized systems and PII data elements to:
- Develop policies and tasks for targeted data discovery
- Scan AWS S3, Snowflake, Oracle, Postgres, and Salesforce
- Identify PII and validate scan results with data owners.
This iterative process allows the team to continue improving the PK Protect logic and enhance scans and policies for the next onboarded systems.
