CitiGroup is one U.S. financial services company that found itself enveloped in a business challenge when the corporation brought together banking, insurance and investment entities under one corporation. With such a diverse array of products and a mammoth workforce employing 260,000 individuals who, together on average, manage roughly 200 million customer accounts across six continents in more than 100 countries, the top executives soon realized that seamless training and communications was going to become a necessity. But solving that issue in the most economically viable way was indeed proving to be a challenge. That is when satellite technology helped CitiGroup increase its corporate presence. Executives at CitiGroup spoke with Satellite Business Solutions and outlined the company’s chief problem and how satellite brought forth a money-making solution.

Antonio Raimundo

Senior vice president

Problem:
How do you create an on-demand solution network and still produce a sizable ROI?

Like Rome, this infrastructure upgrade was not built in a day. CitiGroup decided to start with its Smith Barney investment group and Antonio Raimundo senior vice president, Digital Media Technology, was tasked with this challenge. Once successful, other divisions would join in. According to Raimundo, upgrading the established terrestrial network was not a viable option. “We need live multicast and video-on-demand. To upgrade terrestrially in order to gain the necessary bandwidth, it would have cost us in excess of $3-$8 million,” he says.

Prior to the upgrade, both price and time taken away from the business day were astronomical limitations when it came to training. Utilizing Hughes Network Systems’ Direcway Broadband Via Satellite services, CitiGroup wanted to find a way to enhance the current offering that was no longer providing what was needed. “We were holding eight one-hour training sessions a week during prime business hours [10:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m.] at $500/hr for occasional satellite use,” he adds. “This was inconvenient for our brokers who needed to be in the field during those hours and becoming quite expensive for us.”

Solution:
Increase The Satellite Usage

“Potentially, if you expand by 500 sites or more, your cost could be cut in half. Likewise, our break-even point for the space segment cost rests between 18-26 sites,” Raimundo says. “The price came down from $500/hr to $26/hr and now we can send training content and cache it at the edge, so our employees can train at a time convenient for them and not during peak business hours.” Raimundo also adds that the more sites added, the cheaper this network becomes. “We upgraded from occasional use of satellite time to 24 hours, seven days a week use,”he says.

In the future CitiGroup is looking to expand its satellite service throughout its entire branch offices and divisions. Once complete, a seamless network infrastructure will be in place tied to the corporate office in New York, reaching Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and Asia.