Citi modernizes forbearance with smarter, stronger controls

The Business Issue

Founded in 1812, Citi is a global leader in wealth management and personal banking operating across nearly 160 countries. With more than 200 years’ experience in lending, the bank knew that forbearance was a critical service for customers faced with financial hardship.

But Citi also recognized that its existing forbearance system was fragmented and wasn’t designed to manage the complex dependencies across teams and processes. This led to inefficiencies and disjointed workflows. Changes made in one process often had unintended consequences for other interconnected processes.

Moreover, the existing infrastructure and systems were outdated, making it harder for teams to respond quickly to customer needs or adapt as market conditions shifted. And the use of batch processing resulted in suboptimal customer experiences and slower processing times, affecting operational efficiency.

Seeing the opportunity to transform, Citi embarked on a journey to enhance its forbearance process, driven by the objectives of achieving operational excellence, delivering seamless omni-channel experiences, enhancing risk reporting, expediting time to market, and strengthening controls and analytics for data governance.

The Solution

Citi tapped into its 40 year partnership with Pega to take the next step in modernizing forbearance. Citi uses Pega to streamline and automate its personal banking and institutional client services.

The bank started with Citi’s Branded and Retail Services credit cards, which dealt with a significant volume of cases annually, stemming from personal life events, economic fluctuations, and natural disasters. Citi integrated its internal applications with Pega Case Management to manage forbearance and deferment programs consistently and at scale

The bank undertook a solution architecture revamp and divided the system into three core areas: eligibility, enrollment, and lifecycle management. They used microservices to power eligibility checks, enrollment requests, and real-time updates across Citi's applications and product processors. By harnessing Pega's case management capabilities, Citi achieved better visibility, controls, and coordination across its systems.

The Partner Impact

Citi partnered with TCS alongside Pega to facilitate the implementation. They adopted a collaborative approach, engaging a combination of onshore and offshore Pega resources; Citi's business, risk, and technology teams; and the TCS team. Working in a Scrum model, the teams managed more than 22 sprints, handled over 1,600 user stories, and executed the project with strong leadership alignment, a unified vision, and shared objectives.

The delivery model worked: the first production release landed on time and on budget. Rigorous testing also ensured a smooth go-live. Throughout the journey, Citi’s teams stayed sharply focused on the project vision, executing releases by program types and lines of business. This approach allowed for efficient monitoring and issue resolution, leading to continuous improvement.

The Results

With Pega Platform™ and Pega Case Management, Citi has achieved:

• 50% reduction in manual work for enrollment
• Reduced time for new enrollments from 24 hours to under three seconds – a near 99% improvement
• Omni-channel experiences for agents and customers
• Enhanced risk reporting, controls, and analytics
• Shortened time to market
• Improved data governance and management
• Real-time activity dashboards
• Centralized data repository
• Real-time case view and audit trail
• Ability to flex operations as volume changes

Citi is now shifting its focus toward automation, including automating controls, monitoring tasks, and implementing intelligent routing. Process mining and integration opportunities are expected to further streamline systems and drive greater efficiencies.