Citi's Treasury and Trade Solutions (TTS) has expanded its Citi Payer ID offering to 17 new markets across North America and Western Europe, making it now available in 44 countries.
Designed as a best-in-class receivables reconciliation solution, Citi Payer ID allows institutional clients manage their working capital with greater efficiency by providing the following benefits:
Increased visibility into incoming payments for effective payer reconciliation
Reduced days sales outstanding (DSO), and improved order-to-cash cycle for increased working capital efficiencies
Enhanced automation and cost savings, along with reduced exceptions
"We are fully committed to helping clients simplify their receivables reconciliation for both traditional and digital commerce. Our client centric innovation approach and new technology tools enable us to devise solutions that provide increased visibility and operational efficiency into collection processes, both domestic and cross border," said Manish Kohli, Global Head of Payments and Receivables, at Citi's Treasury and Trade Solutions. "Furthermore, Citi's global network enables us to bring innovation to new markets quickly to meet the evolving needs of global commerce," he added.
Efficient Accounts Receivable processes are increasingly relevant for supply chain and working capital management. Reconciliation plays a significant role in helping companies unlock trapped cash and generate funds internally. However, companies today face multiple challenges in their collection processes when reconciling payments or when collecting funds across geographies.
Citi Payer ID solves this problem by allowing companies to assign unique account numbers to their payers for incoming receivables. The account numbers, which provide visibility into the source of payment, are then used to match the payment with the payer, making the collection process more streamlined and efficient. Citi's Payer ID solution is also helping ecommerce clients such as Alibaba Group achieve scale, deliver operational efficiency and reduce costs all without changing their client's processes.
"Traditionally, we would manually reconcile transactions, a process that created significant delays in distributing funds to sellers in mainland China. After exploring and evaluating different products in the industry, we chose Citi's Payer ID solution, which enables us to assign each buyer a unique payer ID number that is linked to Alibaba's master account. As a result, our systems can now automatically match payments with data that we have on the transaction, allowing us to fully automate this process. Citi's coverage in over 40 countries was another key factor in our decision, as it supports Alibaba's ambitions to rapidly offer our services worldwide," said Griffin Peng, Director of B2B payment and financing at Alibaba.