Citibank Case Analysis How Does

Citibank Case Analysis How does Citibank differentiate its e-business product offering from that of its competitors? How could Citibank create its own competitive advantages in the market place? Citibank relies on a variety of strategies for differentiating its e-business products and services over the time period analyzed in the case study Citibank's e-Business Strategy for Global Corporate Banking. Starting with a focus on how to enable greater multichannel-based banking, Citibank quickly progresses to combining multichannel services with personalization.

This is only partially successful because its globally-based corporate clients are still not entirely trusting the security and level of process accuracy and efficiencies, which are the most common factors in businesses rejecting change (Yap, Wong, Loh, Bak, 2010). Citibank continues to pursue this multichannel approach of services, gradually increasing personalized service and direct human contact to support these strategies. This is marginally successful as well, as other banks are beginning to imitate this strategy.

Electronic or automated channels for banking must have a high degree of trust, personalization and security to the role-based level of Fortune 500 companies to adopt them (Uppal, Chawla, 2009). Citibank has yet to get to that level of expertise in their electronic banking strategies, yet has very broad and deep breadth of technical expertise internally to draw from. The first sections of the case make that clear, yet also show that all the potential talent has little direction to do in besides continually drilling deeper into technology.

Typically when banks are at this level of performance with enterprise, Fortune 1,000 and multinational corporations (MNCs) the perspective shifts from aligning services to needs to service recovery, or understanding why there is a fundamental difference in the perception of services in the first place (Sousa, Voss, 2009). This is happening slowly within Citibank and eventually will lead to the company transforming itself to become more process-centric.

When Citibank begins to realize that is expertise ion process management, process improvement and the integration of processes to better service its corporate clients is its strongest differentiator, the e-business initiatives begin to flourish. There are parallels to the concepts of Dr. Michael Porter and his analysis during this time that illustrate how operational effectiveness can be a significant competitive differentiator (Porter, 2001).

His analysis also shows that strategic positioning can as much be about product or process superiority as it can be about the continual fine-tuning of a value chain (Porter, 2001). In conjunction with studies that show how value chain disintermediation is occurring throughout the entire e-commerce value chain also during this time (Andal-Ancion, Cartwright, Yip, 2003) Citibank has a significant opportunity to redefine an entire industry.

The differentiation that eventually delivers the greatest value is when the company chooses to center its efforts on process and it integration, driving higher levels of performance over time. The case makes the salient point that standards at one time were competitive barriers and have evolved into a factor in cooperation industry wide at a technology level. The myriad of networks the case study points out just underscores this point.

What is needed is not a cost-based form of differentiation to succeed in this industry, but one that can guide with expert skill MNCs, Fortune 1,000 and global enterprises through cash management, revenue management, asset management and highly complex transactions while still retaining the company's value. A large part of this differentiation is predicated on trust and the ability of Citibank to save its largest enterprise customers costs while keeping them agile enough to capitalize on new opportunities.

The element of trust eventually emerges as the strongest differentiator Citibank has, which is comparable to e-banking adoption globally as a key success factor (Yap, Wong, Loh, Bak, 2010). In conclusion, Citibank relies on its process expertise and combination of it skills and complex transaction expertise to differentiate itself.

The decision to integrate all process workflows with the core business, rely on it to act as an accelerator of accuracy and performance, and create value as a trusted advisor is what eventually helps the company to help redefine the value chain of this industry, as Porter predicts in his analysis of competition (Porter, 2001). Citibank's strategic intent is to convert its traditional money management business into an e-business framework.

How does Citibank transform its traditional assets into digital assets? What issues, if any, do you envision that Citibank must overcome in order for the implementation to be successful? Inherent in the plans to convert its traditional money management business into an e-business framework are broader implications of disintermediating part of the value chain in commercial banking at that point in the industry's lifecycle (Andal-Ancion, Cartwright, Yip, 2003).

Citibank relies on its intensive level of business process expertise, combined with its knowledge of it systems to transition from being purely focused on multichannel strategies that include personalized to also include more advanced insights and services for its core customer base of enterprise and MNCs globally. At one point in the case study, the MNCs are growing so impatient with the progress of the banking industry they begin to form their own consortium and begin to create their own trading and order management hub.

If this had occurred the fragmentation of the industry would have led to a drastic drop in Return on Invested Capital, based on analysis of the case using Dr. Michael Porters' concepts on competition (Porter, 2001). Citibank continues its journey from traditional money management business into an e-business framework, relying on its process expertise to gain trust from its corporate customers. The transition from traditional assets to digital assets is driven by the overriding vision of creating a centralized order management hub that can manage more complex transactions and financial workflows.

For Citibank, the new medium exchange is the expertise to manage complex processes that involve large amounts of currency for its MNC, globally-based clients. This transition from traditional to digital assets begins to gather momentum when Citibank begins to realize that it can function as a disintermediator of the market (Andal-Ancion, Cartwright, Yip, 2003). Once this occurs, the need for coordination.