The challenge

From e-commerce to bricks-and-mortar retail outlets, SHOPLINE offers end-to-end payment solutions which include comprehensive payment gateways and e-wallet options. SHOPLINE payment is an integrated online payments platform that can save the merchants the hassle of dealing with third-party payment platforms.

To adapt to the constantly changing environment and meet the challenges of competition, SHOPLINE needed to keep enhancing its product capabilities to stay competitive and gain more market share. To achieve that, the company was looking to:

• Save operating costs.

• Effectively process incoming and outgoing transactions with quick turnaround.

• Automate the reconciliation process and reduce manual work.

• Achieve real-time account visibility and track the status of transactions.

The solution

SHOPLINE partnered with Citi to establish an innovative cash management solution to facilitate its collections and payments for the merchants. The bank leveraged its industry expertise in the e-commerce sector and deep understanding of SHOPLINE’s business model, to develop a customised solution that met SHOPLINE’s key objectives as follows:

• Digitise payments through CitiDirect and host-to-host (H2H).

• Implement faster payment system (FPS) QR collection to achieve instant collection, with a simpler pricing scheme.

• Leverage payer ID solution to reconcile incoming transactions automatically.

• Gain real-time notification on both credits and debits via API with completed visibility to the funding cycle.

• Use Citi Network Instant Payment to allocate funds among SHOPLINE entities across different locations.

“These capabilities have enabled us to significantly improve operational efficiency where the company can provide better services to the merchants accordingly and enhance their experience,” says Ming Liu, Senior Consultant, Business Solutions.

Best practice and innovation

As a result of implementing the innovative solutions with the bank, SHOPLINE has been able to make improvements in cost and turnaround times for collections and payments which can enhance the company’s customer experience and stay competitive.

Standardised collection and payment processes via CitiDirect and H2H, has reduced a significant amount of time operationally and eliminated manual work.

The company has achieved full and real-time visibility of the entire funding cycle and now collects funds instantly and reduces costs significantly with monthly transaction volume of 20,000+.

SHOPLINE collaborated with Citi and leveraged technology with digitisation, to deliver greater efficiencies which is critical to strengthen its position and maintain the company’s leadership in the industry. It also helps SHOPLINE to build a secure and comprehensive infrastructure required to support its continued growth. This is a great example of how a treasury team can leverage technology to help it map out a business and treasury strategy.

Key benefits

• Cost savings.

• Process efficiencies.

• Return on investment (ROI).

• Increased automation.

• Risk mitigated.

• Improved visibility.

• Manual intervention reduced.

• Increased system connectivity.

• Future-proof solution.

• Quality accreditation achieved.

• Improved key performance indicator (KPI) metrics.

The partnership between SHOPLINE and Citi has resulted in a bespoke solution to address SHOPLINE’s business requirements. By taking advantage of technology, SHOPLINE has been able to craft a roadmap to prioritise the solutions for its business and replicate best practices to other markets when the company is expanding globally. With the bank’s support, SHOPLINE can automate both its business and treasury activities to reduce manual work and save operating costs.

“By integration with Citi FPS in HK, SHOPLINE will include FPS in SHOPLINE Payment product suites to offer account to account based solutions to all SHOPLINE Payment merchants. We will also offer QR code rendering on the interface to further enhance the user experience and the payment conversion. Citi and SHOPLINE are both committed to the innovation that can bring true value to the market,” says Raymond Hsu, General Manager of Payment.

“We will continue our digitisation journey to revolutionalise our business and treasury activities from traditional cash management,” adds Liu.