Citi Realty Services

[Tristan_Parker]

Citi Realty Services (CRS) is a division of Citi – the global financial services company which has approximately 200 million customer accounts and does business in more than 140 countries. Citi provides consumers, corporations, governments and institutions with a broad range of financial products and services, including consumer banking, credit, corporate and investment banking, securities brokerage and wealth management. Within Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA), Citi operates in over 50 countries, from Ireland to Pakistan and from Russia to South Africa.

CRS is responsible for all property requirements, including sourcing, managing and lease negotiations, as well as environmental management of all property, which includes responsibility for energy, water and waste.

Citi has been recording its environmental impacts since 2000 and made a public commitment to reduce its CO2 emissions by 10% in absolute terms by the end of 2011 against a 2005 baseline and CRS is tasked with delivering on this goal.

Working towards the target across such a widespread and diverse real estate network will always be a challenge for an organisation, especially as in some of these locations the political, business and other stakeholder pressures to focus on energy and environmental management are not as imperative as in other areas. As a result, over the last few years CRS has placed great emphasis on measuring data to address the issue and using this information to improve environmental performance.

On a quarterly basis the performance of each Citi office and branch in each country is checked and reported back to Facilities Managers to raise awareness about data quality and to highlight opportunities for improvements, as well as pointing out where there have been improvements. This is no easy challenge, as the scale and location of Citi’s sites presents specific challenges in terms of monitoring environmental data and improving performance.

This information can then be cascaded out to management of individual branches, thus ensuring a more effective approach to energy management, as Sam Pilcher, Environmental and Sustainability Manager at Citi Realty Services, explains:

“Every quarter we have a group conference call where I report performance figures and follow this up with one-to-one conversations. This is important as it allows issues and opportunities to be followed up in greater detail and gives a chance to hear about the best practices and successes colleagues are achieving in their country, as well as potential areas to look for more savings.

“For example, in our branches in Belgium, the asset manager communicates to branch managers how the energy performance of their branch is performing, along with tips on how to reduce energy consumption, like good housekeeping tips – turning off equipment and lighting when possible, checking set points for air conditioning and heating. A similar approach is taken by others in countries like Egypt and Turkey, where great emphasis is placed on communicating to other parts of the business to ensure support where it is not always possible to visit every building regularly.

“In the near future, as our retail strategy focuses in on places like Central and Eastern Europe, and the Middle East where there is often less stakeholder pressure to focus on energy and environmental management, there needs to be greater effort in ensuring that the energy and environmental challengers are not ignored. It is a challenge in ensuring that we maintain the same standard throughout the region.”

One way that Citi look to maintain standards throughout the region is to work towards LEED standards [Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design – a ‘green rating system’ developed by the U.S. Green Building Council]. “In the United States we have over 100 branches certified to LEED Silver standard,” says Sam, “and in EMEA we have recently opened buildings in Northern Ireland and the United Arab Emirates which are being put forward for certification, as well as LEED pre-assessments on buildings in Hungary and Romania”.

In addition to green building standards, CRS also investigate appropriate technology. For example, Citi are investigating the possibility of more efficient lighting, as Sam explains: “We’re looking at LED lighting. We’re investigating quality of light, reliability, user comfort, etc. If that works we’ll look to roll-out LED lighting in a number of branches and it will then become the norm wherever there’s a branch refit or refurbishment. We’re currently trying this in Turkey, the UK and Spain.”

One of the largest challenges CRS faces is datacentres, which are always a significant source of carbon emissions due to the large amount of electricity needed to power them, and as such, CRS has concentrated some of its resources to reducing the number of centres across its global operations and improving the energy efficiency of the remaining centres, as Sam explains:

“The firm as a whole is rationalising its datacentres and reducing their numbers globally, from 52 in 2005 down to 27 at the end of 2009. We are ensuring that when we do open new datacentres, sustainability principles are incorporated into the design right from the start of the project. In 2008 we opened a datacentre just outside of Frankfurt which achieved Platinum certification in LEED, making it the first datacentre to achieve that globally. One of its striking features is a green roof, which helps with insulation and has been designed to take advantage of free cooling in order to reduce cooling costs.

“We have two datacentres in the UK, but energy efficiency is harder to address in these because they were built some time ago. We’re looking at on-site generation for these datacentres to see if we can cut our energy, on the basis that there will be less carbon dioxide. This is because you’re using gas to fire your tri-generator, which means your CO2 emissions are linked to gas rather than electricity from the national grid. Plus, you have fewer transmission losses, etc.

“We also have on-site generation at our Dublin office, where there is a combined heat and power (CHP) plant. This has cut CO2 emissions by 9% in the last year. We are now undertaking investigations to convert the CHP into a tri-generation plant.”

CRS is also keen to exploit best practice and knowledge sharing as a means of reducing carbon and improving performance. A best practice engineering group has been set up by CRS to allow staff to find out details or ask questions about any new technology or equipment being used by the firm.

“This group is being used in branches in Spain and Turkey, where LED lighting is also being trialled” says Sam. “People can email questions and ask for advice from engineers around the EMEA region. This is one of the mechanisms that allows best practice to be transferred between countries, and it is important for asset managers in countries to know there’s somewhere they can go to ask questions or obtain a second opinion.”

These efforts do pay off and in 2009 Citi cut over 28 million kWh of energy, resulting in absolute CO2 savings of 8.6% across the EMEA region against 2008, which also includes the impact of the new datacentre increasing its operations.