The challenge
Cadbury’s operation in Nigeria is multi-banked, and the company has banking relationships with 11 commercial banks in Nigeria and 17 bank accounts. The management of the accounts across multi-banks, created operational challenges for Cadbury Nigeria as it involved the use of internet banking portals of all the banks to obtain account balances and transaction reports for treasury management. The manual nature of the process introduced significant inefficiencies in treasury management with information on account balances across all accounts and transactional information, not used for treasury management.
Cadbury Nigeria’s manual process to extract information by logging into accounts daily, required resources, and the process did not meet its objectives in terms of timely receipt of information. Considering global best practice for efficient and effective treasury management, and Cadbury Nigeria’s razor focus on being efficient, solving this challenge was a key performance indicator (KPI) for the organisation.
The solution
Citi implemented Infopool, the bank’s multi-bank data aggregation tool, to address the challenges presented. Infopool presents a single interface to accounts with Citi and third-party banks, and allows Cadbury Nigeria to monitor daily balances and transactions of accounts maintained in different banks from Citi’s internet banking portal (CitiDirect®). Citi has already established connectivity with banks in Nigeria to receive account statement information as MT940 via SWIFT, and has a proven track record in acquiring, validating, aggregating, and presenting data in a simplified format.
The solution was implemented for 17 bank accounts across 11 banking relationships in Nigeria with the flexibility to expand to include additional banking relationships and accounts in the future. Account balances and transaction data are received from third-party banks in the form of SWIFT MT940 messages, decrypted and stored in Citi’s information warehouse. The data is validated, consolidated, and presented as information to Cadbury Nigeria through Citi’s online banking platform (CitiDirect®), where entitlements can be maintained to ensure only authorised users have access to account information. The information is also available to be automatically updated on Cadbury Nigeria’s ERP system, leveraging existing connectivity.
InfoPool takes advantage of SWIFT standard formats for statement reporting. Using the bank’s industry standard translation engines, it translates the SWIFT messages (MT940, MT942 or MT950 messages) into data viewable through the electronic banking platforms.
“The implemented solution is currently for daily end-of-day statements with support for intra-day statements already built in once third-party banks are able to send intraday statements in SWIFT message formats to Citi,” explains Robejemi Ogar, Treasurer.
Best practice and innovation
The solution implemented, demonstrates best practice and innovation in reporting and leveraging SWIFT, an industry-standard messaging platform. Cadbury Nigeria was able to achieve automated reporting of balance and transaction information across all banking relationships and accounts, on a single online banking platform with automated feed into the ERP leveraging existing connectivity.
Key innovative themes include:
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Digitisation: Cadbury Nigeria was able to digitise existing manual process of extracting balances and transactional information across multiple bank accounts. The use of technology and automation to improve treasury activity is a global best practice.
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Treasury optimisation: automation of information reporting across banks, provided Cadbury Nigeria with a holistic view of liquidity positions across banking relationships in Nigeria. This application of technology made planning a lot easier, with the possibility of implementing multibank auto cash sweeps as a second phase deployment.
Key benefits
“This solution has enabled us to deploy technology and automation into existing processes and build scale into the function. We can also extend the solution to include other geographies and bank accounts globally without incremental resources.”
Robejemi Ogar, Treasurer, Sub-Saharan Africa
