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NEW SYSTEMS AND BUSINESS PROCESSES PUT
MONEYGRAM “ON THE MONEY”

I f you use PayPal, you may not have heard of MoneyGram, but millions of people around
the globe use this service to send money anywhere within minutes. Dallas-headquartered
MoneyGram is one of the world’s largest money transfer businesses in the world, with
256,000 partner agents ranging from Walmart to tobacco shops in Paris where customers
can send and receive money. In 2011, MoneyGram generated $1.3 billion in revenue.
For a global money transfer company, it’s essential to be able to move money between two
points around the world within minutes. MoneyGram uses an automated financial management
system to make this happen. The system handles hundreds of thousands of money transfer
transactions each day and ensures that all of the retail stores, banks, and other MoneyGram
agents receive proper financial settlement and commissions for each money transfer.
Despite many years of double-digit growth, MoneyGram’s operations were not working well.
The company was saddled with outdated systems that required the use of spreadsheets and
time-consuming manual processes to calculate payments and close the books each month.
Those systems were adequate for a long time, but eventually their complexity and lack of
scalability constrained MoneyGram’s ability to address market demands, add new products,
and serve the sales team. Moreover, lack of a central data storehouse made it difficult to create
reports, analyze market opportunities, and spot bottlenecks in the system.
Senior management decided to examine MoneyGram’s business processes and legacy systems,
some of which were redundant. It assembled the company’s top business and technology
managers, including the company’s chief financial officer, controller, treasurer, and its executive
vice president of operations and technology. They concluded that in addition to updating tech-
nology, MoneyGram needed to change some of its key business processes.
Culturally, MoneyGram's managers made changes in staff responsibilities to make
employees more aware of the company’s business processes and ways to improve them.
Employees were instructed to understand each step in the business processes they were part
of, instead of their own individual job functions. The company used numerous Webinars and
other tools to show employees how business processes were being altered.
To that end, MoneyGram created a subset of managers called global process owners or GPOs.
Each GPO is responsible for the performance of an individual process, such as cash management,
customer onboarding, or
credit processing. GPOs were
asked to define the current
state of their processes, how
processes impacted each
other, and how they felt they
could be improved. They also
defined how the success of
their process could be mea-
sured, and were tasked with
gathering performance data
to gauge that improvement.
MoneyGram still uses
GPOs in its operations.,
along with subprocess
owners (SPOs), who are
responsible for handling
© Alistair Laming / Alamy

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