Awards for Excellence 2005
Citigroup
Citi excels internationally, and a new web-based application is keeping the firm ahead of its rivals
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| Paul Galant |
“When we finally showed TreasuryVision to the client, we were ready for them to shoot lots of technical questions at us. But their first question was to each other: ‘Why do we have so much money on deposit in that country, and such a large overdraft in this one?'”
So explains Gary Greenwald, the man in Citigroup’s cash management division responsible for building TreasuryVision. In short, it’s a web-based application that consolidates data on a company’s cashflows. There’s nothing new there, one might think, but according to Paul Galant, Citi’s global head of cash management, it’s not the usual data system. “Most systems are very adept at telling you yesterday’s weather. What TreasuryVision gives you is actionable advice.”
It is this product, above all else, that seals the cash management award for Citigroup. The US bank was a strong contender anyway. Its non-US business is rivalled in scope only by Deutsche Bank, though both HSBC and JPMorgan Chase can legitimately claim that they are improving and expanding their global offering, and at times giving Citi more than a run for its money.
Citi continues to excel internationally. It has won a number of mandates in the past year, including the first for a UN peacekeeping mission, providing cross-border payment services in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It has won plenty of other mandates, including Royal Dutch/Shell, BAE Systems, UK pharmacy Boots, Singapore Airlines, Australia’s Dairy Farmers and a large number of others across the globe.
But the development of TreasuryVision shows a determination on Citi’s part to do what big players in any business rarely do: change the nature of the service they offer. “We are the change agent,” says Galant. Both sound like empty statements, but the feedback from PepsiCo, the client for which TreasuryVision was initially built, seems to bear this out: the US drinks company estimates that the system is saving it $100 million a year. “When they came to us they said they were concerned that they were leaving too much money on the table with their cash balances and credit costs across the globe,” says Galant. “They wanted a system that would allow them to act, not one that would simply assemble information for them.”
In part this is simply more evidence of corporates wanting to gain greater control over all elements of their treasury operations in an effort to save money. But it’s also a result of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which demands that companies have, and can show that they have, greater transparency in and knowledge of their finances.
PepsiCo started using TreasuryVision this year, and there are now several others using the system, with more in the pipeline. “The real power of the system shines through when a corporate has 200 bank accounts or more,” says Greenwald. “But it’s a good treasury management system for smaller companies as well.”
TreasuryVision was developed from Citivision, the internal system Citi had built three years previously for use internally by its bankers. It’s web based, and allows for several portals to open at once, all of which can be changed and updated individually without affecting the other portals. Citi chose Microsoft to help develop the system.
The information being put into TreasuryVision comes, in large part, from data a company already has, the rest from all of its banks. Allowing all that information to come Citi’s way might make some of its competitors wary. But, says Greenwald: “The data is for the client, not us, and the system in no way means that they have to switch their cash management business to us; other banks still get business from them.”
But the system has proved to be a real boon for Citi in winning new business, especially in its weakest market, which, somewhat surprisingly to some, is its home market, the US. Citi is now ramping up, becoming in the past year one of the nine banks to receive qualified lock box status from the US government; launching an interactive lockbox; and winning mandates from the departments of state and defence as well as from corporate America, including Cingular and Comcast.
“North America is my best story this year, of the regions,” says Galant. “We’re winning the majority of the business we’re pitching on, winning high-profile mandates such as the Pentagon and Department of State, and our returns are good. The beauty of not having had as large a presence there in the past is that I have no physical infrastructure I have to keep up. I’m pushing for change, offering information-rich services and showing clients ways to save money.”
