The challenge

Following 2021, wildfires in Greece destroyed hundreds of homes and businesses CCHBC recognised the need for an efficient centralised payment portal to collect donations from their employees across the region for those affected by the fires, and for other charitable campaigns.

Traditionally, CCHBC collected donations from employees locally through offline cash collections channels, which were then consolidated centrally and donated to the cause.

But this strategy incurred higher costs, long collection times and collection-to-donation times for the following reasons:

• Prone to human error and inefficiencies.

• Lacked transparency.

• Difficult for donators to pay with different payment methods.

• Required hours of manual work to collect, track and consolidate payments.

The solution

To address these complex challenges, CCHBC partnered with Citi to implement the Spring by Citi digital payment acceptance solution.

In an accelerated onboarding process, Citi’s implementation team worked to integrate the new technology in just ten days.

This allows employees to access a donation portal through CCHBC intranet and donate with full transparency and adherence to PCI DSS requirements.

The donations that were made from the employees by using the platform were then matched by CCHBC in addition to its other direct donations to humanitarian organizations for the same cause.

The donation portal allowed CCHBC to do the following:

• Address the challenges of collecting donations from CCHBC employees across multiple countries.

• Demonstrate best practice and innovation by providing a one-stop-shop solution for digitised payments, simplified donor experience and real-time reconciliation to track donors and donations.

The product incorporates innovative features such as real-time tracking and reconciliation, advanced fraud protection and risk mitigation. These features enable transparent and accurate tracking on donations and safeguard against potentially fraudulent activities.

How Spring by Citi works

In less than two weeks, CCHBC employees were able to access the donation portal through the intranet using their personal credentials.

This enabled tracking of individual activity of each operator on the gateway and reduced the risk of fraud.

Here is how the solution works:

• CCHBC rolled out Spring by Citi through Citi’s integration that links to their intranet, using a Hosted Checkout with payment page – an existing integration method supported by Spring’s gateway.

• Card payments are redirected from the intranet to the Spring by Citi gateway portal, where they are captured and processed in line with PCI DSS requirements.

• Citi provided a Spring by Citi support team, offering oversight and support from the bank’s broader relationship team.

• Citi provided an administration portal, through which CCHBC administrator could track donation volume, & produce reports.

“Winning the Adam Smith Award is extremely important for CCHBC as it recognises the commitment of our organisation to positively impact people’s lives in the communities in which we operate and support them in times of need. It also highlights the importance of collaboration and how technology and financial services can be combined to provide agile and cost-efficient solutions for humanitarian purposes.”

Giannis Batsis, Processes Manager

Best practice and innovation

The solution shows the importance of agility and efficiency in meeting the needs of organisations during times of crisis and the value of technology and financial services in supporting humanitarian causes.

It also demonstrates the importance of agility, efficiency, responsible stewardship, customer support and service – CCHBC and Citi working together to deliver an outcome that met the needs of the organisation in a short period of time.

In addition to ease of use for employees across 27+ countries, the solution adhered to security standards, a critical factor in maintaining donor trust and confidence.

Citi provided a dedicated support team that ultimately helped deliver the solution in a short period of time. The solution was cost-effective, ensuring that the full value of donations went towards supporting humanitarian causes.

Key benefits of the new donation’s portal

• Cost savings.

• Process efficiencies.

• Increased automation.

• Risk mitigated.

• Improved visibility.

• Errors reduced.

• Number of banking partners/bank accounts reduced.

• Manual intervention reduced.

• Increased system connectivity.

• Future-proof solution.

• Exceptional implementation (budget/time).