"Rzeczpospolita" publishes a number of articles under the series title "Business without borders" ("Biznes bez granic") with Citi Handlowy. This time we can read about banking tools introduced by Polpharma in cooperation with Citi Handlowy to facilitate finance management in a big international group. Piotr Tymiński, Head of Cash Management Products Development Department at Citi Handlowy also talks about expansion of Polish companies into foreign markets

Companies which operate in many countries need integrated cash management products, reports "Rzeczpospolita". One of key challenges faced by a company doing business in several countries consists in exercising control over its cash flows. Cash pooling is a tool that has increasingly often been selected and applied by the companies. It enables the consolidation of funds within the entire group on a single primary account. Polpharma is an example of a company that does business on different markets and has already become an international corporation. It purchased pharmaceutical companies in Turkey, Russia, Kazakhstan and Poland. Polpharma cooperates with Citi Handlowy. Since May 2012, after the latest acquisitions, all divisions of the headquarters in Poland have focused on implementation of the systems supporting the group management globally, explains Beata Orłowska, Treasury Head at Polpharma Group, adding the following: "There are two new useful solutions. The first of them is the international system for servicing credit cards. The system allows us to link all our companies to one system in the headquarters. So far, for two of our companies in Poland we have linked nearly 1200 cards and we will add further 1 thousand cards in Russia and Kazakhstan. It offers us supervision and facilitates cards and costs management, because we can monitor all costs online every day, just like employees themselves, explains the manager of Polpharma. The second tool, already implemented in Poland, which Polpharma introduces in the entire group is Treasury Vision
In an interview given to "Rzeczpospolita", Piotr Tymiński, Head of Cash Management Products Development Department at Citi Handlowy says: "There are several tools that we may offer to businesses that run their operations concurrently on several markets, from an electronic banking system, which makes it possible to store data about accounts in different countries at one place, without the need to log in to several transaction websites, to such services as the preview of the total account balance on the accounts held with different banks. Each entrepreneur is trying to diversify the banking services they use and almost all of them have company accounts at two or three banks. Hence, the functionality of presenting the total cash balance at one place proves very useful. That is a key feature of our CitiDirect electronic banking system. Moreover, our product range encompasses a solution that enables executing transfers from non-Citi accounts. In such a case, we contact the client's bank and send the instruction on their behalf. We have just effected the first implementation of the Treasury Vision system at a Polish company being our client; the system makes it possible to consolidate data at one place. Additionally, it offers its users complex tools for cash flow analysis", says Piotr Tymiński commenting on Citi's product range.

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