When a large global consumer products company wanted a better understanding of its financial positions in hundreds of bank accounts around the world, it turned to Citigroup, its lead bank, for assistance.
“Large companies, whether they are multi-national or regional, have banking and financial accounts all over the globe,” explained Gary Greenwald, managing director of Information Products at Global Transaction Services, a division of Citigroup Corporate and Investment Banking. “They range from Demand Deposit Accounts, to short-term investments, to debt. A major corporation could have thousands of accounts with many, many banks. One of the challenges of almost every treasurer I talk to is visibility into and control of the information and processes around their cash and investments.”
Citigroup had some experience in aggregating complex information in a way that provides users with a clear view of the information they need. About four years ago the financial firm worked with Microsoft to develop CitiVision, which provides vital information to about 8,000 of the firm’s bankers. CitiVision aggregates vital client information including news, reports by market analysts, financial and political news and video content from 90 countries in a way which permits each user to develop a customized view of the information he or she needs.
“We had an overly large number of CRM systems, plus Bloomberg and Reuters terminals, and still no one was getting a coherent view. For CitiVision, we worked with Microsoft, which understands the tools like Excel and Internet Explorer that smart knowledge workers and analytically oriented people work with all day long,” said Greenwald.
Edmund Muth, senior director in Microsoft’s worldwide Financial Services Group, describes CitiVision as an intelligent portal. “Citi aggressively exploits many of Microsoft’s technologies – including IE, Windows Media Player (for video), SQL Server, MOM and Web Services.”
“CitiVision makes the 270 back-end systems which support the Corporate and Investment Bank behave in an integrated way, instead of each back-office system having its own front end, navigation, and user interface,” explained Muth. “Results: effective customer care, improved relationship management, better team collaboration, global uniformity, and integration with Microsoft Office.”
For its clients Citigroup took a similar approach to the challenge their company’s treasury faced and developed TreasuryVision to provide an aggregation of financial and treasury information for corporate clients.
“We were able to leverage not only the technology assets but the lessons learned on how to take 8,000 very demanding people at the bank, who aren’t all that different from the people in a large corporate treasury and financial operation, and give them a customized view of their financial information in a holistic way. Microsoft was critical in helping us work with the client and make the paradigm work for a corporate treasury,” said Gary Greenwald.
“TreasuryVision,” said Muth, “is an extraordinary next generation treasury product to connect large, sophisticated, multi-national treasury organizations with high quality, global information on investments, debt, and cash, to support improved liquidity and financial controls. By building on the successful work done in the early part of the decade with CitiVision, Global Transaction Services (GTS) was able to innovate in their product offering at ‘the speed of imagination’.”
A global corporate treasury operation is complex. “For a multi-national corporation, the numbers have a whole taxonomy around them,” Greenwald said. “If you have $1 million in an account, that figure is associated with a currency, a legal entity, a bank, a business unit, a geography, a date, etc. So you need all that information across thousands of accounts in a way that can be sliced, diced, aggregated and segmented in many different ways. This enables the people in treasury operations to understand how much cash sits in a particular country, legal entity, or business unit.”
Predictably enough, once users get all that information–they want even more, and Citigroup is delivering.
Cash positions feed into TreasuryVision’s cash flow forecasting tools, which also can be linked to a firm’s general ledger such as SAP. So if TreasuryVision’s aggregated accounts show a firm has $20 million Singapore dollars in its 50 Asian bank accounts, a treasury department can link that to SAP’s scheduled payments, payrolls, and accounts receivable to create a forecast that is more accurate and almost fully automated.
With a wealth of insight sitting on their desktops, decision makers want to collaborate with colleagues around the world, so Greenwald’s team has added Workflow, which can have a dramatic impact on efficiency. In the works is a new electronic process for bank account management. Today this is typically a paper-intensive process that requires passing along paper for authorized signatures. If an executive with responsibility for Asia who has signing authority on 50 accounts is transferred to London, changing the authorized signatures can take weeks. In Phase II, Citigroup will offer a process using digital signatures.
“We are just starting work on that, but we have a number of clients who are very, very excited,” said Greenwald. “They want straight-through processing for account maintenance, which can be a major pain point. With the new process, if you need to replace one signer with another, you put in your digital signature card to authorize the change, and the new signer would put in his card and it would flow through to the back office of the bank and the change would be made. From treasury’s point of view, it would be almost as simple as the find and replace process is in Word.”
The bank would use Identrus, a secure identity management service through which major banks around the world guarantee signatures within participating firms. Citigroup is working with the .NET development team at Microsoft to create a state-of-the-art product for highly secure identity management.
Greenwald expects that his group’s services will continue to expand as they work with more corporations and find more areas where help is needed.
“Many companies, even the really big ones, have relatively thin treasury staffs that have many, many issues on their plates,” he said. “They have to deal with Sarbanes-Oxley, investment policies, absorption of acquisitions, and they often aren’t at the front of the queue when it comes to getting IT support – they don’t always have the best systems.” Some lack the software tools they need, some are running on old versions of applications that are no longer supported. The biggest challenge is usually integrated information across systems and delivering it to the Microsoft Office desktop.
“Moving information in an effective, controlled and accurate way across all those points is not easy,” he added. “In many companies, the treasury is the product of mergers or regional units that only recently have been put under global management, and they might have five different ERP systems. So the data may be there, and a tool, but they don’t all come together in a cohesive way and the company ends up being less efficient and less in control than it would like.”
Many treasurers are working with spreadsheets, emails and faxes and lack a comprehensive integrated solution for common tasks such as forecasting. So many are happy to have their lead bank offer transaction and information services that permit them to focus on their company’s needs. Beyond information and analytics, Citigroup has a treasury outsourcing group, Treasury Solutions in Dublin, that can handle foreign exchange or management of inter-company transactions – TreasuryVision offers a window that the corporate treasurers can use to monitor the operations they choose to delegate to Citigroup.
So much is changing in corporations, regulations and banking that Greenwald believes the business is at an inflection point.
“That’s why Citigroup is working so closely with Microsoft. I consider this a re-engineering of the financial value chain because so many forces are at work. When you team a Citigroup and Microsoft together, you get the two world class companies in different fields bringing their respective expertise to the desktops of our many common clients – best in class financial services and best in class technology. A good synergy is a tight linking of Microsoft Office capability with the delivery of financial information. See these pain points, and have real clients to vet and shape these ideas – well, there is magic in them thar hills.”
TreasuryVision is based on Microsoft, including the .NET Framework and SQL Server.
“As we continue to push into new areas, we are in a multi-year partnership with Microsoft,” Greenwald explained. The bank worked with Microsoft Consulting Services, Avanade and Microsoft product teams in Redmond. “We have this great track record with everything we have done with Microsoft, so we are excited to be working with them.”
www.citigroup.com