Citi upgrades corporate spend analytics package

These enhancements will enable clients to easily identify and target opportunities to capture Accounts Payable spend leveraging Citi's Virtual Cards Account (VCA) product, recipient of the 2011 PayStream's Technology Excellence in Electronic Payments award, and Meeting & Event (M&E) spend to further optimize their Citi Commercial Card programs.

CWCA, an in-depth consultative service available only to Citi clients, analyzes an organization's spend data to provide comprehensive visibility into their overall expenses. Clients receive actionable reporting and benchmarking data to help them better understand how and where they are spending. In addition, the CWCA tool enhances clients' spend data leveraging third-party sources to maximize the value of these intuitive reports.

Virtual Card Accounts for Accounts Payable & Program Optimization

The recent CWCA enhancements provide additional insights enabling Citi clients to capture more spend using Citi Virtual Card Accounts (VCA), a global payment solution that allows companies to create single-use 16-digit plastic-less account numbers for vendor payments. Transaction-level controls, enhanced workflow tools and robust reconciliation data allow clients to further optimize their Purchasing Card programs.

With the recent enhancements, clients can tap into a new CWCA report to identify and target suppliers likely to convert to single-use virtual cards for Accounts Payable spend. CWCA draws on client-specific data such as transaction size, payment frequency, supplier industry and payment terms to help design strategies to maximize virtual card acceptance. The resulting benefits can include increased working capital and process efficiencies.

In addition, CWCA also offers reports identifying opportunities to expand Purchasing Card use to include higher-value payments and new spend categories. With these insights, clients can leverage the controls and security of VCA's single-use accounts to capture this incremental spend without changing the controls, limits, or policies in place for existing "walking plastic" Purchasing Cards.

Meetings & Events Spend

With North American meeting expenses estimated at $274bn, using CWCA can provide organizations with increased visibility into this often hard-to-quantify spend to allow improved cost management. Leveraging industry-specific business rules targeted at key M&E categories, such as conference space, food & beverage, and audio & visual, Citi clients can quickly identify opportunities for supplier consolidation and conversion to a holistic M&E payment tool. CWCA also enables detailed visibility into spend by supplier and merchant category codes - down to the transactional level detail - and provides recommendations and ROI calculations customized to an organization's goals. Clients can re-run the analysis periodically to measure the effectiveness of their efforts.

"We're very excited by these new enhancements to Citi Working Capital Analytics because of the benefit they bring to our clients. These new offerings arm our clients with the information necessary to pinpoint potential improvements to their working capital management and M&E payment program," commented Deirdre Ives, North America Commercial Card Head.