Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Nick LeCuyer, VP of Strategy and Distribution at Western Union Digital (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What is the upshot of all this? The fact that it is so much more convenient nowadays to do a transaction – you can send money directly from your mobile phone. Has that increased the volume and the frequency at which people make use of the service?

Nick LeCuyer: I will talk about it from a couple of dimensions. Let me first talk about the customer viewpoint, and then I can tell you what it means for us as a service provider. From the customer viewpoint, this is a lot more convenient. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Nick LeCuyer, VP of Strategy and Distribution at Western Union Digital (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What are some of the other mobile payment innovations that you are monitoring and what are your observations about those?

Nick LeCuyer: There is a wide range of innovation going on. Those innovations span different sorts of markets – they span low-end to high-end devices, different classes of financial services, etc. There are companies in the U.S. that will allow you to deposit a check into your account using your mobile device. Previously you had to go into the branch, use an ATM, or mail in the check. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Nick LeCuyer, VP of Strategy and Distribution at Western Union Digital (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s take that case and transfer it to a mobile money transfer scenario. Does it mean that both parties – the sender and the receiver – need to have your app on their mobile phones?

Nick LeCuyer: Absolutely not. That has been a core principal of how we designed our digital services, which is to be able to isolate the channel choices of the sender from the receiver. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Nick LeCuyer, VP of Strategy and Distribution at Western Union Digital (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Then there is international money transfer. There are all sorts of mobile payment technologies happening. Could you talk a bit more about these developments, how you process these trends, and what decisions you are taking in the domain of mobile payment? >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Nick LeCuyer, VP of Strategy and Distribution at Western Union Digital (Part 1)

Nick LeCuyer is the vice president of strategy and distribution at Western Union Digital. He holds an MBA from the University of Michigan and a BSE in civil engineering from Princeton University and had more than 13 years of experience in corporate strategy as well as consulting. In this interview, Nick talks about the role of mobile in Western Union and the company’s business model and gives us detailed insights into the future of mobile payment services.

Sramana Mitra: Nick, let’s start with setting some context about yourself as well as what you are doing at Western Union Digital in the domain of mobile and social technologies. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Kristin Muhlner, CEO of newBrandAnalytics (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: I think social media marketing is extremely complex and time consuming. The analytics part is getting automated more by players such as your company, but the actual marketing part is still incredibly manual. If you are doing consumer marketing or any kind of brand marketing that requires you to seriously use social media to get your distribution – which now is the reality of the lives of most businesses – you have to do social media marketing. It is a very manual process. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Kristin Muhlner, CEO of newBrandAnalytics (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Are you a venture-funded company, bootstrapped company, or something else? What is the genesis of your business?

Kristin Muhlner: We are venture backed by NEA and by Revolution.

SM: What is the revenue range of your company? >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Kristin Muhlner, CEO of newBrandAnalytics (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You are talking a lot about domain-specific ontologies and workflows. How many domains are you covering right now?

Kristin Muhlner: Today we have five service-based ontologies. We have one for food and beverage, one for hospitality, one for retail, one for healthcare products and one for government. All of those are under a general ontology that is unified under a service- or product-based organization. It speaks of general types of experiences that an individual might have when engaging with an organization. That can be modified to support any type of organization or industry. >>>