SBB Magazine / February 2020

INTERVIEW
BEING THE BEST BANK
FOR SMALL BUSINESS CLIENTS
Marcin Woźniak, Commercial Bank CEE
Head at Citibank, talks to Olena Gryniuk
about working with the SME segment at
Citibank
How many banks in Citi Group (and in which countries) are
involved in servicing SME customers here in the CEE region?
In the CEE region, Citi serves SME customers in Poland, Russia,
Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Turkey. We have local
teams on the ground in these countries and provide clients with a full
range of banking products.
What is your segmentation of SME customers in the Group?
We actually do not use the term SME at Citibank or in our Commercial
Banking segment. We address different client needs by allocating them
to either the Emerging Corporate segment, which covers smaller clients,
managed by the owner or owner’s family or Mid Corporates, who are
usually professionally managed and use more complex services. Our
Emerging Corporates, clients with annual sales from USD 5 mln up to USD
100 mln, are probably closer to the definition of SMEs in CEE.
What is the Group’s strategy for servicing these customer segments
in the coming years?
We would like to be the best bank for these clients. The way to achieve that
is to have the best bankers in our teams, an outstanding service model and
record turnaround time for onboarding and lending in the industry. We
also plan to digitize our processes to be able to respond faster to customer
needs.
What are the main acquisition channels for SME customers at the
moment?
In our acquisition process, we do not use any channels other than RM and
we do not plan to. We carefully prepare ourselves for each and every client
meeting so that we know what their needs might be and what we should
offer. We don’t want to become an online supermarket for prospective
customers. We want to offer the services of our best-in-class bankers
who are able to tailor a proposal to client needs and advise on possible
solutions and options. We do not acquire and do not plan to acquire our
clients via online channels. Of course, there are some customers that send
us inquiries through our webpage contact details or Facebook profiles, but
this is not going to be a strategic channel for the client segment that we
would like to acquire.
Which digital solutions do you have right now for your SME
customers?
Apart from the obvious electronic banking solutions, we are able to
provide our clients with an online FX platform where they can trade foreign
currencies online, book FX forwards and options and use our information
services. The platform also has a risk management module that helps our
clients to manage their FX risks. In addition, we offer our clients integration
of electronic banking with their ERP systems offering multiple variants and
advancement levels. We are adopting digital signatures where possible to
digitize the documentation that we sign with our customers. Our clients
are able to switch transactional communication with us into a simple file
exchange, where all the transactions, confirmations and statements can be
exchanged directly between client and bank servers without any human
intervention. Our digital solutions allow our clients to have access and
transact with Citi on all of their accounts, not only if they work with us
locally, but also in other countries.
16
FEBRUARY 2020