Citi Transaction Service's Global Concentration Engine (GCE) has now topped well over $1.5 trillion per month in flows. The GCE platform today provides automated cash mobilization services in 84 countries, including 44 with cross-border services.

Citi deployed its new GCE in collaboration with Microsoft, who wanted to replace time-consuming manual wire transfers with a more efficient zero balanced account (ZBA) structure. Microsoft sought a banking solution that would automate the sweeping of account balances on an end-of-day basis, while also delivering data enabling its systems to process the entries automatically. Citi enhanced GCE's functionality and prioritized new markets based on Microsoft's requirements and feedback gathered during the pilot.

New features in the GCE allow users to monitor and limit the movement of funds and to customize reporting capabilities that automate back-office reconciliations. All of these capabilities will be extended to additional markets. Citi's global liquidity network provides advisory, analytics, mobilization, and investing services across the world.

"Microsoft Treasury set the bar high," said George Zinn, Corporate Vice President Treasurer at Microsoft. "With this new liquidity structure, we have jointly developed a solution that automates cash concentration for bank accounts, creates a just-in-time funding model for operating accounts and enables 100% accounting automation. The success of this project is largely due to the hard work and coordination of all stakeholders involved."

It is the sheer scale of Citi's coverage and operations that amaze. Achieving consistent levels of service and operations world-wide is very, very difficult to achieve.