Harnessing Innovation to Enhance Global Visibility

by Lisa Davis, Global Product Manager of Global Billing and Statements, Treasury and Trade Solutions, Citi

Globalisation, regulation and evolving business strategy create a wide range of challenges and complexities for corporate treasurers. At the same time, treasury departments globally often need to strive for operational clarity and simplicity to maintain process and information integrity and control. Technology and solution innovation can play a vital role in managing this increasing complexity. While new solutions often need to be highly sophisticated in their design and functionality, this should not compromise the ease with which treasurers can deploy them.

An essential obligation for a global bank is to find new ways of harnessing innovation to promote digitisation for automation, efficiency and control, and sustainability to reduce manual paperwork and environmentally-harmful activities. One example of digitisation, sustainability and simplification is Global Statements, providing a complete and consistent view of bank statements, transactions and fees to corporate treasurers and finance managers.

Rationalisation and standardisation

Over the past few years, many multinational corporations have sought to rationalise their bank relationships and work with a limited number of trusted banking partners on a regional or global basis. This has often proved a highly effective means of standardising processes, information flows and pricing, and gaining access to local, regional and global solutions that are specifically tailored to the company’s needs. Having established regional or global banking relationships, however, treasurers need to ensure that they have full visibility over accounts across each branch, country and region, together with outstanding transactions and other activities.

The challenge of account visibility

Visibility and control over cash balances and positions with every counterparty bank is a significant prerequisite for treasurers seeking to manage liquidity, risk, costs and operational efficiency more effectively. This is typically easier to achieve in a centralised treasury organisation, but even then it can be difficult to gain a consistent and comprehensive view of every service and how it is charged. Many find that some countries are outside the scope of their global pricing and reporting structure, and accounts may appear of which treasurers were unaware.

Furthermore, many treasury organisations deal with large volumes of data, some accessible in diverse formats through various electronic platforms, and some in hard copy. Data received through disparate means and formats is complex and time-consuming to consolidate into a consistent and useable format, and may not be up-to-date. Furthermore, it can be difficult to make decisions based on large amounts of data unless this can be structured appropriately to provide meaningful insight for the business.

Consolidated Global Statements

As part of Citi’s ongoing innovation programme to support digitisation and sustainability both within our own business and amongst our customers, we engage with our customers to find out what new capabilities would deliver the greatest value to them. As part of this constant feedback process, our customers have emphasised the importance of ‘self-service’ capabilities, enabling users to access information quickly and conveniently whenever they require it, as opposed to having to make a request to the bank. In response to this feedback, we have developed our Global Statements capability. Global Statements provide treasurers with a single consolidated view of global transaction volume and related price on a monthly or quarterly basis through our electronic banking platform CitiDirect® Online Banking, as required.[[[PAGE]]]

Standardisation and flexibility

One challenge when providing this capability in the past has been the lack of an accepted industry standard format, but the development of TWIST BSB (Bank Services Billing), proactive support by banks such as Citi as well as vendors, corporations and independent organisations such as SWIFT have led to its incorporation into ISO 20022 standards, therefore reducing this uncertainty. However, the additional challenge with ISO BSB formats is the need to invest in existing software to support these formats which may be difficult to justify. Consequently, a more flexible approach was required. Citi’s Global Statements are available in both ISO BSB and Microsoft Excel formats as a demonstration of our support for international standards and recognition of our customers’ need for flexibility in order to integrate data with in-house systems.

ISO BSB (Bank Services Billing)

The ISO BSB is a standard, industry-accepted format for providing bank customers with information on balances, bank services and related fees, irrespective of where accounts are located. It was first conceived in 2003 and adopted by TWIST (Transaction Workflow Innovation Standards Team) the following year, supported by a number of key banks, corporates and vendors, leading to the BSB format. This was adopted as part of the ISO 20022 in 2012, and rapidly adopted by innovative banks that are committed to standardisation such as Citi.

Benefits of Global Statements

The ability to access complete information consisting of cash, transaction and billing information across all accounts, subsidiaries and regions can bring considerable benefits to treasurers globally:

• Treasurers have a complete, timely view of cash and risk, facilitating accurate decision-making;
• By understanding where cash is located, and in what currency, treasurers can optimise liquidity across the group, reduce the cost of borrowing and enhance investment yields;
• Accounts can often be rationalised, ensuring streamlined bank account structures which are easier to administer;
• Bank fees can be examined and pricing structures negotiated to ensure a consistent approach across accounts and regions. 

These benefits extend not only to companies that use Citi as their primary bank across all regions, but also those that adopt a multi-bank strategy. By receiving information in a standard format that can be consolidated across banks for a like-for-like comparison, treasurers can quickly achieve a global view of cash, risk and fees across all banks and regions.

Achieving objectives: Simplification, digitisation and sustainability

Transparency and insight into positions, balances, transactions and associated costs is poised to become an essential requirement for treasury professionals globally. While this is achievable to some degree on a regional basis in regions such as Europe and North America, it has not been possible in the past to achieve a global view. Citi’s pioneering Global Statements capability provides a consolidated view of a customer’s activities across the bank in 85 countries in an accessible, standardised electronic format. Treasurers can use the results to support more accurate and strategic decision-making. Global Statements therefore support many organisations’ objectives to simplify their processes, digitise their transactions and information flows for better visibility and control, and to promote more environmentally sustainable business practices by removing paper and hard copy mailings from their processes. At Citi, we continue to engage proactively with our customers to understand how the innovations in which we invest can support these objectives, benefitting our customers, the bank and the wider financial community.