CIO interview: Hans van der Waal, director of global IT, Travelex

Investment

In truth, the corporate was already planning to put money into digital and on-line merchandise earlier than the difficulties it confronted in 2020.

“Since we emerged from the problems, with the support of our new shareholders and the decline of the Covid-19 pandemic, we restarted all this work,” says Van der Waal.

Critically, he says that Travelex doesn’t need to utterly “replace itself” with a digital different, however sees digital tasks as an extension to its present presence. “We regard our presence in some of the airports and other locations as our prime assets, and the way we support customers online is an extension of this physical presence,” provides Van der Waal.

But the corporate’s legacy tech methods did have to be changed to assist its more and more digital future. “Legacy systems had challenges around risks and costs of maintenance and support,” says Van der Waal.

These methods included these offering knowledge storage, level of sale performance and fault detection. He says the enterprise had additionally acquired methods over time because it took over corporations in numerous areas, leading to changing into much less agile and making it tougher to do “something new”.

After a pause in a lot of the work throughout 2019, work resumed on the transformation in 2021. This included transferring methods into the general public cloud. “We had a self-hosted datacentre model in the past, but now we have shifted the entire estate to the cloud,” says Van der Waal.

Travelex’s enterprise methods now sit within the AWS cloud whereas finish person computing harnesses Microsoft Office 365. The mission to maneuver to the cloud took a few yr to finish, and included transferring about 600 servers and about 150 functions.

On the client aspect, Travelex is concentrated on cellular, with an app that helps its pay as you go card enterprise. Cards are loaded straight from the client’s checking account with as much as 10 totally different currencies. There are additionally on-line companies resembling click on and gather, which incorporates the flexibility to order money and gather it in shops or at ATMs.

Significant money demand stays

Although the use of money is declining, Travelex nonetheless sees important demand, in response to Van der Waal. “In certain markets, you see a gradual decline in the use of physical foreign exchange services with the move to mobile wallets, but this is not going super fast. “Cash is definitely not dead in the next few years,” he says. “Travellers are still looking for the convenience of having some cash in their pockets.”

But Travelex can also be investing in streamlining the expertise for patrons in search of money, with the event of new kiosks, which Van der Waal says “are somewhere between a branch and an ATM where a customer can make an order on-screen and pick it up at the counter”.

The bodily presence remains to be valued by Travelex, which acquired extra branches as opponents left markets when the pandemic decimated enterprise.

Van der Waal says the corporate now has a stable basis to construct digital companies, with infrastructure as a service established. It has additionally constructed a totally cloud-native and serverless integration layer the place it integrates to third-party companies by software programming interfaces.

“The foundations are there and in partnership with the business to develop digital propositions that support our presence in countries,” he says. “The transformation means we are more agile and can do this in a much faster way.”

Van der Waal believes this places the corporate’s tech improvement groups on the same footing to small cloud-native opponents.

One present mission is seeing the corporate use the info mesh ideas to construct a cloud-based knowledge platform on AWS providing knowledge to totally different domains of the enterprise. This is a bit like doing agile improvement over knowledge somewhat than performance for the client. “We now have end users that can build their own queries and develop their own insights rather than having to go to IT for reports all the time,” he says.