Citigroup (C) Partners With Taskize, Eases Workflow Woes

Citigroup Inc. C has joined forces with Taskize Limited for a strategic agreement to combine the latter’s structured workflow capabilities with Citigroup’s industry-leading proprietary custody network present in more than 60 markets. The partnership will create a network effect between Citigroup, its counterparts and other market infrastructures to enhance operational workflows.

Custody clients of Citi Securities Services can leverage Taskize’s query management platform to directly connect to their Citi Operations counterparts. With Taskize’s user interface and the creation of an end-to-end operational workflow experience through the partnership, the traditional email mechanism will no longer be required by custody clients to contact their respective counterparts. It will also provide real-time visibility on the status of an ongoing query and complete audit trail capabilities. Such features are likely to be crucial to address operational workflow challenges.

Jeffrey King, the global head of custody product development at Citigroup noted, “This partnership is based on a shared vision of secure inter-company workflows for query management and to move away from email chains between operational counterparts.” He also said, “By leveraging Taskize’s email management, flexible API integration and traceability on queries with fully auditable workflow, our custody clients will be able to gain greater insight into the status of their queries.”

Philip Slavin, CEO and co-founder of Taskize said, “We are delighted to be partnering with Citi, empowering them to service their clients in a secure, efficient and transparent way.”

This move by Citigroup reflects its commitment to offer innovative solutions to clients and mitigate risk. In fact, while streamlining costly counterparty workflows across buy-sides, sell-sides, custodians, market infrastructures and Fintech providers, Taskize’s platform ensures data sovereignty. Citigroup's custody clients will also be able to raise queries to all other institutions operating on the platform.

Over the past year, shares of Citigroup have gained 17.9% compared with 46.8% growth recorded by the industry.

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Currently, Citigroup carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). You can see the complete list of today's Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

Stocks to Consider

Some better-ranked stocks in the banking space are Southern First Bancshares SFST, Colony Bankcorp, Inc. CBAN and Community Trust Bancorp CTBI. At present, Southern First sports a Zacks Rank #1, while Colony Bankcorp and Community Trust carry a Zacks Rank of 2 (Buy).

Over the past year, SFST stock has jumped 95.8%, whereas shares of CBAN and CTBI have gained 34.7% and 25.1%, respectively.

Over the past 30 days, the Zacks Consensus Estimate for Southern First’s current-year earnings has been revised 13.3% upward while that of Colony Bankcorp has been revised upward by 15.2%. Current-year earnings estimates for Community Trust have moved up marginally over the same time frame.

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The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.