The United States Postal Service receives and delivers over 680 million pieces of mail each day via its network of 38,000 post offices and retail outlets and 400 processing facilities. The mail is securely and reliably delivered to 143 million addresses. No single operation in the world comes close to this level of connectivity with households and businesses across America.
Senior leadership of the United States Postal Service (USPS) undertook an aggressive multiyear strategic transformation plan designed to promote growth, improve reliability and drive continuous improvement – with Citi as their partner. Having exceeded transformation targets so far, USPS continues to set aggressive goals for cost reduction and efficiency. This was part of the Smart Pay 2, a search for an automated solution for reconciling centrally billed travel card accounts presented a critical opportunity.
USPS’ then-current manual reconciliation process resulted in a high percentage of unmatched transactions. Through its travel management company (TMC), USPS was able to address a significant portion of the booked transaction reconciliation, but had limitations in its ability to address transactions that occur after the original travel ticket is purchased, which ultimately led to significant data gaps in the reconciliation process and additional workload placed upon the Agency Program Coordinator (AOPC). Depending on agency internal reconciliation and payment policy unreconciled transactions can cause payment delays.
Working with Citi and its TMC, the Postal Service implemented Enhanced Reconciliation. This solution eliminates the matching and reconciliation burden from multiple TMC locations and, through the use of intelligent matching algorithms and extensive data sources, provides more accurate matching and timely reporting of mismatches so that resolution can happen closer to the date of travel. This solution has been able to consistently provide up to 95% reconciliation of CBA transactions within its deployed markets. With an eye on continuous improvement, Citi’s matching algorithms utilize multiple processing routines that are refined over years of real-life performance with constant evolution to maximize the efficiency and completeness. The Citi Enhanced Reconciliation process also has the added benefit of centralizing the data reconciliation process, minimizing the number of data sources an AOPC is required to manage during reconciliation.
Citi has more real-world experience administrating commercial card programs for the federal government than any other provider – and as expected, the United States Postal Service has measured real progress on its goals.
In addition to establishing a more-efficient, timely, end-to-end reconciliation process and eliminating the matching and reconciliation burden from cardholders, and improved visibility of card transactions. Program Coordinators now have the ability to view unmatched transactions via CitiDirect’s Electronic Access system intra-cycle, daily or weekly to address unmatched transactions.
The ongoing match rate has exceeded 95%, which translates to a savings and greater visibility into the reconciliation process.