For banks across the world, the coronavirus pandemic created countless new challenges in servicing clients and many sought answers in the acceleration of their digital development. Over a number of years Citi has been working to improve its digital offerings across all its businesses – work that stood it in good stead to help retail and institutional clients tackle the new environment they faced in 2020.
In recognition of the progress the bank has made across a range of different areas, Citi wins the award for North America’s best digital bank.
“Our business model is to be digital first, branch-lite and this has been a multi-year journey of investing in digital platforms,” says Anand Selva, chief executive of Citi’s global consumer bank. “Over the first two years it was about building capabilities to ensure you could do everything you could have done in an analogue channel.
“The last few years have been focused on the customer experience, making it frictionless and solving pain points. Covid probably accelerated that by a year, but it was a journey we were already on.”
In 2020 the bank attracted $12 billion of digital deposits, a rise of 142% year on year. Transaction volumes on digital wires and Zelle rose sharply, and the bank sees most of its card accounts now opened digitally, as well as two-thirds of all major activities.
Partnerships form an important part of the bank’s strategy to build scale. It is a credit card partner to half of the top 10 US e-commerce companies and over the course of the year it announced a partnership with Wayfair, the online furniture and homewares store, for a private label and co-branded credit card.
The bank also expanded its Citi Flex Pay scheme to Amazon, allowing customers to convert their purchases seamlessly into a payment plan after the event. It has developed ways of allowing purchasers to use card rewards as payment.
New tweaks to the bank’s digital banking app allow customers to access a wealth of features, with predicted balances based on expected spending and upcoming bill payments, as well as accessing details of other bank accounts from within the same app. Easing pain points is a focus: clients can dispute charges from within the app and can also use a digital card while waiting for a replacement physical card to arrive.
We were the first bank to announce a relief programme, giving customers the ability to defer card payments and offering retail bank clients fee waivers
Anand Selva
As the coronavirus pandemic worsened, all US banks had to grapple with the Small Business Administration’s PPP. Citi managed better than many, with a digital portal up and running in less than three weeks to help with applications, allowing it to provide loans of more than $3 billion.
The bank also made it easier for retail customers to access the help they needed. “We were the first bank to announce a relief programme, giving customers the ability to defer card payments and offering retail bank clients fee waivers,” says Selva. “It could have been very cumbersome, but we created a digital capability where card members could enroll themselves – we didn’t want to add pain to pain.”
Tech solutions are all the rage in consumer banking, but Citi has been equally active on the corporate and institutional side of the business. It set up a digital policy, strategy and advisory practice to help clients navigate emerging technologies, advising governments on how to digitize their financial systems and corporate clients on how to adapt their operating models.
In commercial banking, the bank redesigned its CitiBusiness Online platform, adding a new portal for client onboarding and know-your-customer requirements.
The bank’s securities services franchise saw a flurry of developments, including the spin-off of Proxymity, an investor communications platform that the bank developed in-house and which completed a strategic funding round of $20.5 million. D10X is an incubator set up within Citi a few years ago and which helped develop Proxymity alongside the Tel Aviv-based Citi Innovation Lab.
Alongside fintech Sharegain, Citi also launched an automated securities lending tool for wealth management firms that plugs into their infrastructure.
The investment bank has not been neglected either. City Velocity is the bank’s web-based analytical tool and it was ranked top in the 2020 Institutional Investor Survey for the second year running. It is used by more than 95,000 clients and provides more than 25 million data series.
The platform was put to good use during the pandemic, with the bank aggregating all its Covid-related coverage there. And the bank is now repurposing it for the investment banking side of the business, bringing the credit and equity market content within it to corporate treasurers. It is also planning to add new issue dashboards for capital markets clients.
“After many years of investment, 2020 was the most critical year for us to go digital in all our client interactions and we were pleased that the institutional clients group [ICG] was able to digitally deliver complex transactions,” says Sandeep Arora, head of digital for ICG and its chief investment officer.
“Treasury and trade solutions also quickly adapted to serve our clients’ needs as e-commerce volumes shot up. Securities services worked on many blockchain initiatives and, in markets, our Citi Velocity platform was voted number one. All in all we are thrilled with how ICG handled the pandemic.”
