CITI TTS Healthcare Consumer & Wellness Client Magazine

08 09 Healthcare, consumer & wellness As its business grew in Asia, the consumer brand The Hut Group (THG) was facing an increasingly complex web of relations with its huge number of individual partners, among them translators and social media micro- influencers, many of whom don’t have traditional bank accounts. Again, the solution was to partner with Citi and Kyriba to build an end-to-end payment system, this time integrated via SWIFTNet FileAct so THG could make instant payments to digital wallets in more than 20 different currencies from a centralised account in London. Moving forward, these kind of digital transformations won’t be seen as a luxury - they’ll be recognised as essential to any growth-focused business. As Ian Armstrong, THG’s Group Treasurer, says: “The automated, streamlined and transparent solution we created together with Citi and Kyriba will change the way companies think about cross-border payments to individuals, whether it be for influencer payments, or for consumer refunds or payments to small freelancers all over the world.” The complexity of today’s business world is unprecedented. Big companies deal with suppliers and customers all over the world; they are frequently bedevilled by incompatible legacy systems; and the rise of social media means they have various interfaces to maintain in multiple territories. In all cases, these complexities involve time- consuming and expensive bureaucracy – and the most productive way to handle them is to embrace digital transformation, the surest way to enable operational growth. Take, for example, the British multinational bottling company Coca-Cola Europacific Partners (CCEP), dealing with a number of pain points when it came to collecting payment from its huge number of SME customers in the UK. Their old system was costly, suffered from a lack of fee transparency and had a sub- optimal settlement model. The only solution was to automate the process using Spring by Citi, a new payment processing solution that simplifies the complexities of accepting digital payments by offering a holistic solution from a single, centralised provider. The result was full pricing transparency and faster fund settlement. As Melina Iankova, Associate Director of CCEP’s Customer-to-Cash GB Market, explains: “All users from our end find the platform very easy to use and navigate. We are also able to track payments, and we receive the reports that we have agreed on. Overall, we are very happy with Spring by Citi for credit card payments, and we have started proposing this option to our customers more and more.” When the French multinational corporation Danone conducted a review of its businesses across Asia it was discovered that its disconnected legacy systems were hampering growth. The solution was to work with Citi and the treasury management system provider Kyriba to decrease the manual workloads of its treasury teams and enable price visibility and transparency. Automating the process has improved risk management, centralised FX hedging and, as Zurab Abutidze, Danone Asia Treasury Head, points out, saved money: “With annual trading volumes of over $1.5bn, even a saving of 1bp translates to $150,000 per annum.” No expansion without automation: how digital transformation enables operational growth 20 different currencies that can be paid via THG’s end-to-end payment system All users from our end find the platform very easy to use and navigate. We are also able to track payments, and we receive the reports that we have agreed on” Melina Iankova Associate Director of CCEP’s Customer-to-Cash GB Market Zurab Abutidze Danone Asia Treasury Head With annual trading volumes of over $1.5bn, even a saving of 1bp translates to $150,000 per annum” Thenew consumer DYNAMICS