Citi Gains an Edge with Its Dublin Global Service Center

Cash management for customers worldwide now is all reflected in one place-on the desktops of the new recruits in Dublin. Securities business support is comma soon to the new facility. The latest and largest fruit of the Irish government's efforts to encourage multinationals to establish back offices in Ireland is Citibank's global service center in Dublin. The office is to be the main site for cash management and securities processing on behalf of Citibank's offices in Western Europe, while supplementing service to other areas including the United States. has 900 corporate offices and retail branches throughout Though the Dublin center is only a third of the way toward completion, is already, for a start-up, by far the largest foreign financial services project in says Aidan Brady, Citibank's chief executive here. Brady's office is in the International Financial Services Center (IFSC), a Dublin-based tax shelter for offshore investment that has been extremely successful in bringing business to Ireland, since its creation by the government in 1986. The center currently employs 4,000 What prompted a global center From the IFSC, provides agency treasury services, funds administration, custody, trustee, and other services to large corporate customers. Almost a quarter of Citibank's clients in Ireland themselves operate out of the IFSC. administers funds worth more than $8 billion on their behalf. decided to establish a new center serving its branches worldwide mainly because it needed additional capacity. However, it was also interested in rationalizing its operations in the U.S., says Bob Kelly, newly appointed head of Dublin's global services center. (Where the bank once had seven servicing centers, it now has three.) Furthermore, says Brady, Citibank wanted to amalgamate its U.S. cash management people with its European cash management people. Last February, cash management staff working on dollar-denominated accounts were the first to go live in the Dublin center. The group of 110 replaced staff laid off from Citibank's Wall St. office. With Dublin being five hours ahead of New one immediate advantage of the move is that staff have longer to work on accounts before hitting the Federal Reserve's deadlines. Dublin also handles inquiries from Citibank's Asian and European offices, until, Kelly says, at about 3.30 p.m., Buffalo ramps up to handle Northern Europe. Even in its early stages, there are several measures of the Dublin center's success. Paul Nolan, head of customer service, says less than 1% of calls are abandoned, compared with a standard 3% for the financial services industry. Also, calls are answered within four seconds, whereas 10-to-15 seconds is the norm. Now, in 50% to 60% of cases, investigation of queries kicks off on the day they come in. Formerly, i.e. New York, says Nolan, queries wouldn't even come in until the next Currently, the queries coming to Dublin are from other offices worldwide. Later, calls will be taken directly from corporate customers wondering about the status of their international payments. When the center is fully operational--probably late 1998, or early 1999--it is expected to receive about 1,000 calls per day and to have $500 billion worth of transactions pass through it per day. The technology to support this includes an automated call distribution system supplied by Lucent Technologies. However, most of the software being used in Dublin was written internally by Citibank. It includes subsystems for transaction processing, customer service, and budgeting. Citibank's main investment in technology for Dublin was the roughly 2 million Irish pounds ($2.8 million) spent on PCs, which tap into pre-existing systems housed overseas. …