In 2007, Citi and the U.S. Department of State’s Passport Office, its largest federal civilian organization partner, processed over 20 million passport applications.
To keep up with the growing demand for passport applications, the Department of State (DoS) needed to establish a modified process for scanning and batching passport applications. DoS identified that it could eliminate duplication and reduce redundancy and inefficiency in the passport application process, allowing the organization to better capitalize on its resources and meet the forecasted demand for passport applications.
Initially, an application was scanned twice, once by Citi at a lockbox location as data entry operators keyed in application data, and a second time by the Department of State to capture all of the page one application data, extract the passport photo, and print the photo on the travel document. Additionally, applications were also batched twice, once at Citi and again at DoS.
The DoS Passport Office has partnered with Citi since 2006 to improve control, efficiency and quality of the end-to-end passport process, making many transformational improvements. DoS was already using Citibank® Lockbox Services, our high-speed processing environment and image-based platform for receivables management, advanced reporting and image inquiry when the DoS asked Citi to augment this solution, enabling the scanning of applications, extraction of applicant photos received at lockbox locations, and storing and batching of images by Citi.
Citi successfully met the challenge and created a new process for scanning that also enabled DoS to ultimately pull images from a Citi server. Most importantly, this solution allowed DoS to enjoy the efficiency, simplicity and control of transmitting images in color and transmitting not only data files, but also image files – simultaneously.
When this photo image application went live, the DoS substantially increased workload efficiency by removing an unnecessary step in the passport application process. DoS representatives praised Citi’s partnership and its project management, technology, operations and client management expertise – and Citi and DoS are already planning the next generation of process improvements.
Over the past two years, Citi has continued to refine the photo image process, and has greatly improved the quality of the images being received at the agencies. The rescan rate for the client has been reduced from 12.1 percent (pre-implementation) in 2008 to 5.9 percent in 2011 (post-implementation). The photo image project has resulted in not only a significant increase in production for the client, but a substantial reduction in costs as well.