Treasury Strategy & Transformation
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Common Standards, a Superior Experience

Hemant GadaAn Interview with Hemant Gada, Head of Channel and Enterprise Services, EMEA, Treasury and Trade Solutions, Citi

A key priority for Citi is to offer a seamless, consistent and effective experience to its clients across the entire Citi global network. An important means of achieving this is through efficient, integrated and user-friendly channels between Citi and its clients. In this interview, Helen Sanders, Editor, discusses what this means in practice with Hemant Gada, Head of Channel and Enterprise Services for the EMEA region at Citi.

What are your clients’ major priorities today for bank communication?

Standardisation has been a priority for both our clients and Citi for a number of years, not least due to SEPA. SEPA has introduced new instruments based on ISO XML 20022 formats and prompted greater recognition of both the benefits of standardisation and the opportunities that now exist. For example, we are seeing considerable interest in adopting ISO XML 20022 formats across multiple banking partners and a wider geographic reach to replace diverse, fragmented formats.

To enable coherent information flows across all the countries in which Citi’s multinational clients operate and to help clients reduce costs and increase productivity, Citi is committed to promoting a standardised approach in the way that clients communicate with us. This includes supporting bank-agnostic communication wherever possible, including both the channels and the formats with which we communicate with clients. For example, we are expanding the use of XML across all our channels, including host-to-host, across our entire footprint with an aim to provide global homogenised format.

We recognise that Citi’s global network offers huge benefits to our clients, so we aim to enable them to operate consistently across our footprint. For example, while historically the processes  for opening accounts in London, Shanghai or Johannesburg may have been different, we are striving to offer a standard process and format wherever possible whilst ensuring compliance with local regulatory and legal needs.