CitiBank Case Study

1. What are the impacts of the internet on the competitive landscape of corporate banking?

 

Citi bank was facing a lot of competition in the banking sector by many other private and public banks. Innovations raising at all directions in the stream of internet banking, Citibank started to adapt the same for its customers to provide internet banking services. The major threats can be classified as Threat from new entrant, bargaining power of customers, threat from substitute, bargaining power of suppliers and rivalry among existing competitors.

 

• Threat from New Entrant

There are many new private banks popping up to provide high end services for their customers with new technologies that can cut cost and provide better customer service than the existing conventional one’s.

 

• Bargaining power of customers

Citibank has a varied spectrum of customers from huge corporates to common public hence it has to make services catering all the categories of customers under its belt. Huge corporates keep constantly updating their technologies and services.

 

• Threat from substitute

Many top fortune 500 companies had their banking attached with Citibank, so Citibank has to constantly updating their services so that the competitors with better services doesn’t take their customers away.

 

• Bargaining power of suppliers

The new and high-tech technologies used in the banking sector are produced by many software companies suppliers, hence costing will be always a scrunch.

 

• Rivalry among existing competitors

Deutsche Bank is one of the existing competitors who has a payment system with accepting many currencies, language and local businesses practice through debilis service. Hence Citibank has to have a constant check of continuous improvement in services and technology.

 

2. What has Citibank done to differentiate its e-business products from those of its

competitors?

• Citibank was one of the earliest pioneer to adopt banking into web services.

• They followed e-Business strategy to make services more streamlined and efficient.

• They made sure automation plays an important role in increasing productivity and even did some artificial intelligence projects to aid the process.

• Citibank also made web as a integral part of the working environment.

 

3. What can Citibank do to create competitive advantages?

 

• Citibank can introduce more facilities for customers to integerate in their everyday lives such as making UPI payments accessible.

• Citibank could stream into cryptocurrency and accept and be able to store them creating a new whole world of transactions.

• Introducing new services such as mobile banking can be implemented.

 

4. How has Citibank successfully converted its traditional money management business into an e-business? During the process of transforming traditional assets to digital assets, what issues should a company like Citibank take into account to ensure successful

implementation?

 

• Citibank made its payment gateway into the web making way for international transactions to be made easy with cross border transactions with proper security backing the transactions, this was brought into work by e-Business model.

• Gradually every action was brought into the web services such as checking one’s transaction history, balance enqui, money transfer, making investments and etc.

• Every model which was designed was aimed at the making the Citibank go global and make a easier way of handling money across accounts.

 

A company like Citibank would face a lot of obstacles in the due process hence the data management is very vast and very confidential, hence the security facilities of the firm should be in top compliance at any given point. And making customers to migrate to new technologies introduced by the bank is also a humongous task because each and every customer will have a specific way of handling things, so the shift to be homogenous there should a lot of parameters taken into account.

 

5. What actions has Citibank taken to serve the needs of two very different market segments, MNCs and SMEs?

 

MNC:

MNC’s wanted their interface and services to be very custom made to their needs, Citibank being a very customer centered they produced all the custom web-based platform for the MNC’s to work along with them. Hence MNC’s have capital to invest in new technologies to get their needs done in the first place. So migration of e-Business for MNC’s was not a very rough road map.

 

 

SME:

SME’s were not initially into transferring their system into a web-based models as they preferred the existing conventional model of transactions system and banking. Hence was not ready to invest in e-business technologies. So, Citibank came up with more secured transaction methods to make them understand the rightfulness’ of the much-needed change. Citibank reduced their pricing of technologies facilitating SME to afford them and adapt the change in a smooth fashion.

 

6. How has Citibank’s Cash and Trade Group managed to develop different e-business

products for varied industries? With the market changing so rapidly, how does Citibank

identify market needs?

 

Citibank offered many Cash and Trade group services to manyof their existing and new customers. They offered services such as deposits, investments, bonds, foreign exchange transactions to their customers.

 

• Transaction services, such as cash management, trade and custody services.

• Corporate finance services, such as working-capital finance, trade finance and asset-based financing

• Treasury market services, such as hedging and foreign exchange

 

Citibank always provided a wide spectrum of services to customers from various backgrounds. So Citibank is constantly in sync with the customer needs to make them a top priority to fulfill the requirements in the processes.

 

7. One of Citibank’s challenges is in managing vendors and suppliers without allowing them to exploit its clients. How does Citibank protect its clients from its strategic partners?

 

Citibank has partnered with companies like Oracle, SAP AG and Wisdom technologies, etc to track all the needs and proceedings of the clients. Citibank always monitors the vendors and suppliers for any discrepancy with their clients in various levels of magnitude. It has made smart contracts with the suppliers and vendors so that no exploitations would happen even in the macro level of the operations. And even formed a company called matrix.com which connected buyers and sellers in a emarket place to make safe and secure transactions.

 

8. Prepare a SWOT analysis to evaluate Citibank’s e-business strategy.

 

Strength:

• The security parameters of Citibank is very high.

• Citibank constantly invest in upcoming technologies and try to imolemet them to make the service more catered to the customers.

• Many automated services are provided which makes the customer feel more comfortable and secure with very less margin of errors.

• The clients are always put in front of any services as Citibank is very customer centered bank with all the services made sure the customer feels better.

 

Weakness:

• There is always a constant expenditure of money towards the technology they acquire, or they adapt.

• The MNC’s demand of custom based platforms will make a huge deal of work and money spent in that sector to make them comply.

• Almost all the models are expensive and making medium scale companies to suffer to adapt the shift easily.

 

Threats:

• It must constantly update because there are numerous private entity banks making similar technologies and advancements.

• The cost could make the customers to move to different banks.

 

Opportunities:

• They can slowly seep into blockchain technology to make the transactions more secure and more stealth.

• Citibank could find opportunities in the cryptocurrency industry to be a pioneer in the banking industry.

• They can create more decentralized banking pattern.

 

9. How does this case demonstrate the alignment of an e-business strategy with a company’s overall business strategy?

 

E-Business aids Citibank to become a major player in the global banking sector. Always the first purpose of Citibank was to make the customer needs satisfied and create models aiding the same. So this web based e-business is a integral part of the company’s go forward of the work. The migration of MNC and MSE is a big part of the compay’s alignment with the e-business strategy. And making security as a top concern also made the process very worthwhile in the transition.

 

10. Beyond the case: Citbank has hit hard times in the last several years. Do you think the strategy described in this case helped in the decline or was this a bright spot? Explain your answer.

 

It was in the bright spot from the start as many new and existing customers become pateron of the bank. And many MNC companies also worked along as they had their custom based platforms delivered. But after sometime making custom based platforms has become more difficult and time and money consuming, and even had an issue with credit card transactions. Either way investing in new technology will lead to making the company to bring back its glory again and create more opportunities to expand their horizons.