RELX Group works with a variety of suppliers globally – with its employees making a significant number of business-to-business payments across numerous geographies to support the company’s day-to-day operations. Yet, RELX Group’s previous purchasing card programme did not deliver global acceptance and holistic reporting oversight – causing issues and delays with procurement decisions, payment efficiencies and supplier relationships.
The company therefore sought a purchasing card programme that would be widely accepted, providing control and visibility over decentralised buying decisions. RELX chose Citi’s Purchasing Card programme since Citi’s global issuance model, maximum acceptance using the Visa and MasterCard schemes, as well as consolidated reporting platforms, meant it met these needs.
In addition, incomplete reporting and lack of global payments visibility was another key challenge with RELX Group’s previous purchasing card programme. By running multiple card programmes, RELX Group needed to merge multiple spreadsheets with Accounts Payable data in order to obtain global reporting. Not only was this inefficient, it also created potential errors and reduced faith in the quality and scope of the data.
What’s more, RELX Group’s previous card programme faced multiple challenges regarding card acceptance – forcing the company to implement numerous card programmes with different card issuers. Even so, the complexity often resulted in employees using personal cards for convenience.
Citi’s Purchasing Card – accepted at more than 40 million locations worldwide – has given employees far more confidence in the programme, which has generated significant positive momentum in terms of usage. This, in turn, has eased reconciliation, and meant that reimbursements are rarely needed to be made to employees for personal card use.
The Purchasing Card programme has created process efficiency by automatically uploading data through Citi’s Global Card Management System (GCMS), CitiManager, eliminating the use of outdated manual processes. It has also resulted in operational savings by no longer requiring vendors to be set up in RELX Group’s ERP system, nor requiring credit checks for suppliers before determining payment terms.
“As a business, we can target more business opportunities with a Citibank Visa Purchasing Card,” says Martin Stevens, Procurement Manager, European Travel and Global Corporate Cards at RELX Group. “The solution has streamlined payment processes and provided greater acceptance, visibility and reporting.”
Furthermore, Citi’s Purchasing Card solution enables global reports to be run from the Citi Custom Reporting System (CCRS), Citi’s global data repository – providing full and immediate data analysis of the programme and employee spending habits. The solution also provides advanced reporting and transaction management tools, which is particularly beneficial to RELX Group – allowing them to see each transaction in one data depository. This single source of accurate global data has aided procurement decisions and proven a key tool in supplier negotiations, where suppliers are often working with less accurate data with respect to the volume and value of payments.
Using Citi’s Purchasing Card programme, RELX Group has a smarter and more efficient way to make payments – with greater acceptance, reporting and visibility. The success of the programme is best highlighted by its take-up in EMEA, the increased number of commercial card transactions processed and improved employee satisfaction.