Microsoft to Support Citi's Institutional E-banking Platform

Microsoft and Citi’s Global Transaction Services (GTS) have announced their collaboration on a multi-year initiative to support CitiDirect BE, Citi’s newly launched next-generation e-banking platform, serving its corporate, financial institution and public sector clients and also optimised for the white-label business model.

This collaboration between Citi and Microsoft’s product and services teams to build an e-banking platform takes advantage of Microsoft technologies. With a global network spanning more than 100 countries, Citi will benefit from this collaboration because the CitiDirect BE platform will help monetise its best-in-class service offerings and geographic coverage, while taking advantage of Microsoft’s expertise in platform engineering, development of independent software vendor communities, and product lifecycle management. Citi says that, by leveraging Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, CitiDirect BE will raise the competitive bar beyond transactions to include sophisticated analytic capabilities, self-service modules such as Citi’s electronic bank account management (eBAM) offering, and rich media to provide expert insights on current trends and economic news affecting clients’ business. The new platform has taken a client-centered approach in its design focusing on providing clients with greater visibility and control over their business processes to create a richer online banking experience.

Based on a service-oriented architecture (SOA) and open standards, the CitiDirect BE platform is designed to provide the following benefits:

• Collaborative innovation. Unique engineering collaboration between Citi’s GTS organisation and Microsoft product and services teams accelerates innovation across the global financial services ecosystem.
• Standards. Microsoft and Citi are actively furthering SOA adoption, as well as standards in the industry.
• Agility. Based on Web 2.0 technologies, Citi’s portal infrastructure and modular technology will provide clients with a greater level of customization and usability. This enhanced flexibility will also allow for the white labeling of the platform to other banks.
• Operational efficiency. Citi’s white-label offering will enable correspondent banks to leverage its industry-leading treasury and trade services platform under their own brand, thereby benefiting from Citi’s geographic footprint, regulatory compliance and back-end processing.

CitiDirect BE will incrementally leverage Microsoft products that are being developed and released to support a strategic enterprise strategy. Microsoft will contribute services and applications to CitiDirect BE.

System users will benefit from integration with Microsoft SharePoint Server media capabilities, business intelligence platform and mobile payment functionality, as well as from technologies that lower the total cost of ownership of Citi’s middle-tier and transactional layers.

Comments are closed.