Integrated Payment Services (IPS)
Previous System

IPS is an application front-end to internal payment and accounting systems for funds transfer through Checks, Wires and ACH(Automated Clearing House). It also provides financial information, consolidation/reporting and EDI translation services. It provides a single interface for the customer to initiate or receive financial information from multiple payments and accounting systems through EDI and proprietary formats. It insulates the customer from interacting with multiple payments systems of Citibank and facilitates an indirect link to other financial systems.

 It supports the following solutions:

Payments instructions in EDI / Flat file formats
Checks / Advise printing in customer specific formats
Payment Confirmation / Issuance Information
Remittance information of outbound/inbound payments
Acknowledgment services through EDI 997 , 824
EDI Translation services
Purchase Card
Lockbox services
Problem areas
These solutions were supported through automated and manual processes. The system was a legacy system being used since the 12 years. The environment was Mainframe based with limited scope for technology adaptation. The system was a single threaded array of batch processes with no automated process control. It did not provide for automated activity logging, MIS and effective audit trial. It catered mostly for domestic payments with a limited focus for Foreign currency payments. Being a legacy system, it did not get the benefits of growing technology and was not volume scalable.
Objective of the re-engineering project
The objective was to re-engineer the system into an object oriented, client server based system with the following features:
Convert into a global Payment service
Multithreaded, on-line, concurrent processing
Client server technology
Event driven, object oriented
Process Management capabilities
Volume scalability
Dynamic scheduling
Automated reconciliation
Automated logging of activities and processes to provide for effective MIS and Audit trial
Automated billing