Partnering with Citi comes with a commitment to being the best for its clients. This brings Citi’s clients a distinct advantage – one that becomes even more evident when times are challenging. In his introduction to the 2020 Citi Treasury Dialogues – The Global View, Naveed Sultan, Global Head of Treasury and Trade Solutions, Citi, explains why.
Naveed Sultan
Global Head of Treasury and Trade Solutions
At Citi, our local presence and global technology helps us support our clients, our employees and the communities in which we work.
Our global presence for example, meant that we were on-the-ground in all regions for our clients from the beginning of the current crisis. We were able to offer locally nuanced responses on a globally consistent basis – supporting our clients with expertise and solutions as the pandemic began to unfold around the world.
The root of this is our continuing commitment to being the best for our clients. That is why we consistently invest in leading-edge technologies across our uniquely global platform.
That is also reflected in our talent – we invest in a client-facing team and supporting experts who together bring the most relevant solutions to help our clients navigate challenges, as well as grow.
With this, each day we seek to help our clients marshal their liquidity, finance their trade, and make their commercial payments, even as they enter new markets and digitise their business models. We do this for our corporate, public sector and financial institutional clients.
For us, one important innovation theme has been to deliver state-of-the-art digital banking solutions. Working with our clients we re-designed our account opening and documentation management processes and launched a digital account opening solution, enabling clients to open an account in two days. As a result, our client digital account openings in March 2020 were up 300% year-on-year. However, our digital banking solutions do more than that – from helping clients accelerate migration to our new global platforms, to ensuring sufficient credit limits on purchasing cards, to helping clients pay and relocate employees.
We even accelerated our digital initiatives during the crisis. We call this our Journey to Digital. Even as our volumes reached near-record levels, our operations and technology teams maintained critical business processes and provided clients with uninterrupted service. Our CitiDirect BE platform helped clients working remotely and using mobile devices to make and approve payments to suppliers, pay payroll and taxes, collect from customers, and ensure they have ample cash flow. This is our way of supporting our clients’ operational resilience.
Our Journey to Digital has also led us to creatively adapt our client engagement activities to include more relevant insights and advisory. In the first six months of 2020 we held over 107 webinars hosting more than 15,000 clients at virtual events covering topics from continuity of business, to working capital optimisation, supply chain management and liquidity management.
At Citi, we commit to continue raising the bar on client experience – from the way our teams engage with our clients, to ensuring we deliver digital solutions, to providing access to the most relevant information at the right time and place.
On that note, we hope you find our Treasury Dialogues series to be insightful and useful.
