Supreme test

The coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) pandemic has certainly put Ahmed’s skills and commitment to the supreme test like never before. “When the enhanced community quarantine (ECQ) came into effect, the leadership team led an all-hands-on-deck effort to ensure that our banking and service center operations would not come to a standstill,” he says.

“While we had tested our contingency capabilities in January because of the Taal Volcano [eruption], the imposition of the ECQ required us to act fast to implement resourceful solutions to support our employees and our clients,” he adds.

“A key goal at the beginning was to take measures to ensure that the vast majority of our 8,000 employees could work from home, that a skeletal staff be housed in close proximity to the office and that work on-site was undertaken in a safe manner.”

Pro-active measures were immediately established, benefiting employees, clients and the community. For the employees, these included delivering more than 3,000 desktops or laptops to employees so they could work from home and purchasing WiFi devices to help them secure a more stable connection to the bank’s network; maintaining a skeletal staff at Citi’s corporate offices and branches; increasing hygiene protocols by providing masks for on-site staff and temperature checks; and providing a special award to employees under certain income thresholds to help them financially during the pandemic.

For the customers, these included modifying process flows and leveraging on digital capabilities to an even greater extent to accommodate their working from home; helping them access capital markets and issuing payment holidays, including those relevant to specific client circumstances.

For the community at large, Citi contributed P7.5 million to the Covid-19 Community Response Program of the Philippine Business for Social Progress Inc. to provide survival packs to 7,200 households,