Global Head of Commercial Cards
To compensate for the lack of travel during the pandemic, Citigroup’s commercial cards unit forged industry partnerships, with a focus on expanding in other types of business payments.
One big upside of this strategy has been the rollout of a new way for business customers to make streamlined payments to ecommerce suppliers.
Thanks to a collaboration with Corporate Spend Innovations, Citi customers can integrate their virtual cards into the CSI platform to send payments, in this case often for digital media and advertising.
The move helped the business-to-business segment account for 54% of new-business wins in 2020, up from 25%.
Motivating the more than 1,500 employees within the commercial card unit to chase new business during a global economic downturn was “the most significant leadership challenge,” Latif-Schmitt said.
She started by providing comfort, then asked the team to examine pre-COVID initiatives and help figure out what to continue pursuing, what to jettison and what new direction to pivot toward, as the business needed to adjust its strategy.
“This phase was most critical to retaining talent,” she said. “It was crucial that our talent could see past the current challenges and feel secure in their roles.”
The final phase was to act as a cheerleader. “I had to show we had the potential to be a high-growth business again,” said Latif-Schmitt, who is on the executive committee for Citi’s Trade and Treasury Solutions business and co-leads the Women’s Network for that business.
“Thankfully,” she said, “our metrics are improving and we are slowly returning to growth.”
Helping people become more skilled at evaluating information they receive from all sources — whether from schools, video games, television or computers — is a personal passion for Latif-Schmitt, and she is on the board and on the executive committee of the nonprofit National Association for Media Literacy, or NAMLE.
