Citi India launches new digital cross-border payment solution

Corporate clients won't need physical documents for international payments.

Citi India recently announced the launch of a new digital cross-border payment solution that eliminates the need for multiple, underlying physical documents for cross-border trade payments. The solution substantially reduces time, effort and cost of each transaction by facilitating quicker trade payments.

With Open Account import payments, Citi’s clients can now directly share import payment information with the bank, by simply quoting Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) Import Data Payment and Monitoring System (IDPMS) number, as against the earlier process of sharing multiple documents to support a single payment. This will be made available on Citi’s online banking platform CitiDirect BE for clients to initiate and authorize payments.

Citi India worked closely with the Government of India and leveraged RBI’s IDPMS platform that digitally tracks imports to develop this solution, reducing the turnaround for cross-border payments to less than three hours from the earlier same day processing. India’s $660 billion cross border trade is currently ranked 143 in  the World Bank’s ‘Ease of Doing Business’ report and could significantly benefit from solutions like these.