Company profile

Citi Virtual Card Solution enables automated, low-cost payment for digital advertising expenses.

NOVAON GROUP is a technology enterprise based in Vietnam. NOVAON was established in 2006 and has become one of the pioneers in the digital field in Vietnam. As the preferred partner in Vietnam for most of the world’s largest digital platforms, NOVAON is an industry leader across Southeast Asia. At present, NOVAON has 10 member units and more than 1,000 employees in five countries: Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines and Singapore.

After 15 renovating years, NOVAON has become a leading technology corporation in the consultancy and implementation of digital transformation solutions.

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The challenge

NOVAON provides digital transformation and marketing solutions to a number of clients. As part of this service, they are purchasing media directly from large digital advertising platforms.

Based on their prior process, they were making a manual cross-border payments to these platforms. This process posed several key challenges for NOVAON’s Finance Team:

• Cross-border funds transfer required the finance team to provide extensive documentation in order to complete payment
• NOVAON was incurring high FX fees in order to settle with the digital ad platforms in the billing currency of USD
• After making payment, NOVAON had to manually allocate expenses to each of their customer’s accounts in order to properly pass on the media expenses

The solution

Given these issues, NOVAON was seeking a more streamlined and efficient payment process, which would also provide them with some financial benefits.

The Citi Commercial Bank team proposed for NOVAON to leverage our industry leading Virtual Card Account (VCA) Solution. As a next generation payment method, Virtual Cards enable clients like NOVAON to instantly initiate payments to suppliers, while maintaining stricter controls than a traditional plastic Purchasing Card product.

NOVAON implemented a Citi Web Virtual Card program. This program enables NOVAON’s finance team to generate a unique Virtual Card Number (VCN) for each sub-account on the digital ad platform. The VCN is then lodged on the ad platform as the primary payment method, and the card is charged automatically when the billing threshold is reached. Unlike cross-border funds transfer, there is no need for NOVAON finance team to submit documentation prior to the payment being processed.

Once a payment is completed, NOVAON is able to see detailed transaction reporting. Since Virtual Cards can support custom data elements, NOVAON is able to leverage these data fields in order to automate the transaction allocation process.

In addition to the efficiency of the payment and reconciliation process, NOVAON had two major considerations which Citi’s solution was able to address:

• Security: NOVAON wanted to ensure that the card would be used only for approved purposes. By leveraging the robust controls available on Virtual Card, NOVAON is able to control the total spend on a card, the individual transaction limit, and the merchant that the card is processed by. This protects NOVAON against any potential misuse of the card.
• FX savings: Citi was able to offer competitive FX fees, in order to minimize the currency conversion costs that NOVAON incurred. While the digital ad platform processes the card payment in USD, NOVAON is able to settle with Citi in VND. Additionally, Citi’s detailed reporting gives NOVAON transparency on the currency conversion rate applied to each transaction.

Process Flow

“The Citi Virtual Card program has saved us a lot of time in making payments to our digital advertising partners, and it was very straightforward to implement. Our Citi relationship team and the dedicated Cards Implementation Manager have provided a lot of support.”

Lê Thị Mến, NOVAON Finance & Accounting