Citibank this month announced the launch of a new reporting system that enables multinational commercial clients to report and analyze charge card and travel data from 29 countries and in 11 languages. The platform gives Citibank the broadest global reach of any Visa or MasterCard issuer and the most expansive reporting next to American Express, which issues cards in 37 countries and offers data consolidation from all of its markets.
Citibank this month will scrap its former reporting tool, as many of its customers already are live on the new Custom Reporting System, the reporting and analytical component to the issuer's Global Data Repository, which was launched last spring
(BTN, May 12, 2003).The former reporting platform accessed the Global Data Repository but only for U.S. data, said Gary Schneider, global business manager for Citibank commercial cards.
"This is that same product on steroids, basically. It's truly global," he said. "Any program administrator anywhere in the world can see any piece of data that we collect from any country and on any platform."
One of the highlights of the tool, Schneider said, is that it enables corporate card administrators to create customizable reports without the aid of their IT department or the bank issuer. While the tool offers canned reports, clients can "create dynamic queries with easy-to-use design wizards."
Through the tool, Citibank—an issuer of both Visa and MasterCard commercial cards—said it is expanding on hotel folio partnerships and bringing in line-item data from its clients' preferred hotels. Treading beyond Visa's and MasterCard's secured contracts with various hotel chains, Citibank is working with customers to gain access to hotel folio data from their preferred suppliers.
"Visa and MasterCard have been very good at creating deals with some large chains, but not all of the big ones have signed up," Schneider said. "I haven't seen Marriott or Hilton or Hyatt or W on the list yet, and we want those. We're working specifically with properties that our clients are using that may or may not already be in the Visa or MasterCard fold."
Although Schneider would not disclose the names of properties offering the folio data or the clients receiving it, he said the goal is to "have more data available than the associations will provide." Citibank has worked in conjunction with its clients through letter writing campaigns and RFPs to gain the data from hotels, Schneider said. "Every one of our customers is a large travel buyer with negotiating clout," he said. "So if we approach their properties and say, 'This is important to our relationship with you and we'll drive more nights with you if we get this data,' the hotel properties come around pretty quickly. They realize it is a differentiator for them to secure a large client."
Meanwhile, as Citibank touts its global capabilities, the bank—along with U.K.-based HSBC—announced that China has given them permission to issue credit cards in the country, making Citibank and HSBC the first foreign bankcard issuers to gain such approval.
As Citibank gears up to issue a consumer card in the country, Schneider said that a commercial offering soon should follow.
"China's a hot country that keeps on coming up. We're not sure of the volume that is there today," he said. "We do believe it will be a large travel market and also a huge purchasing card market because of all the manufacturing that is happening there."
Although Schneider said he could not commit to a corporate launch in the country by year-end, he hopes to be the first U.S.-based bank to issue commercial cards there.
"There's a lot of work to do on the purchasing card side because I don't believe that a lot of those merchants accept credit cards," he said. "I'm confident that the travel merchants do, because there's a lot of U.S. and non-Chinese citizens coming to the county for business and using credit cards to pay. I think there's a lot of infrastructure there on the travel side. We'll have some work to do on the purchasing side."