As ever, the world’s best digital bank was a fiercely contested award. In the end it came down to a shortlist of three US banks. But it was Citi that won by dint of the sheer range of its digital services and its ability to innovate furiously as it anticipates the needs of clients.
‘Digital’ as a creative concept and as an engine to drive income is integral to everything that Citi is and does. On March 2, 2022, at the bank’s first investor day in nearly five years, chief executive Jane Fraser called it a “digital-first” bank, laying the groundwork for success by investing in technology and digital client solutions.
Last year, Citi spent $10 billion on technology. In 2022, that number will grow to $11 billion, up 30% in two years, with digital headcount on track to grow just as fast. It now employs 30,000 software engineers, more than many leading tech companies. As Fraser noted in March, this is central to its plans to build a “simpler and better-controlled bank, with an operating model design for the scale and the speed of the digital age.”
Shortlisted
- JPMorgan
- Bank of America
Rarely does a year go by without the bank unveiling a range of new or augmented digital services, but this time it went into overdrive. Last July, it launched Citi Self Invest, which gives clients the ability to make no-commission trades in stocks, mutual funds and exchange-traded funds with no account minimums.
The service is loaded with functions, including educational resources about investing and personal finance, and a dashboard that gives Citi a complete view of a customer’s financial journey. It proved a big hit: 90% of users carried out their first investment transaction with Citi in the four months to the end of March 2022.
Another standout success was the launch in August 2021 of Personal Instalment Loans, which allows pre-screened Citi-branded card owners to apply for loans via their mobile or desktop. It includes all the right visually friendly aids: a dynamic sliding tool that lets customers see loan amounts, rates and monthly payments, and reminders for providing additional documents, which can be uploaded digitally.
Citi Custom Cash, the bank’s inaugural mobile-first credit card, was launched in June 2021. A cash-back credit card with no annual fees, it automatically adapts to spending trends. After adding the card to a digital wallet, members are rewarded with 5% cash back on their top spending category. An embedded ‘horse-race tracker’ service lets holders see how they spend their money and earn rewards.
“As our first mobile-first credit card, Custom Cash provides a fully digital end-to-end experience, from account application to setup,” says Michael Naggar, head of personal banking technology, Citi personal banking and wealth management.
“We want to deepen our relationships with customers and help them to bank better wherever they are,” he adds. “Our goal is to anticipate their needs and provide a seamless experience regardless of channel or transaction type, while combined with the bank-grade safety and security customers expect.”
Citi’s drive to innovate touches every part of its own – and its clients’ – business. Particularly impressive is its ability to expand existing services and engineer new ones that corporates have long been asking for, ensuring long-term loyalty.
The bank expanded its Electronic Trade Loans platform to 71 countries in 2021, making it easier for companies to facilitate international trade and manage working capital. Use of its institutional online and mobile banking platform, CitiDirect, increased by 78% year on year in 2021, with 87% of clients now using its mobile app.
It is collaborating with TradeLens, a blockchain-based supply-chain platform that processes 700 million transactions and six million documents a year. Another success is Komgo, which Citi co-founded with 22 other corporates and financial institutions in 2018. The blockchain-based digital trade network now has over 200 financial and corporate customers. Among other things, Komgo digitizes workflow, verifies and tracks trade documents, and manages the issuance of trade-finance instruments.
“For many years our strategy has been to be a full-service provider for clients in all the geographies that we operate in, providing them with a customized range of services based on their needs,” says Stuart Riley, head of technology at Citi’s institutional clients group. “We’ve digitized those services and we are able to offer the most complete set of digital features from data, analytics and research through to payments, lending, trading and working-capital management solutions.”
Our goal is to anticipate [customers’] needs and provide a seamless experience regardless of channel or transaction type
Michael Naggar
Citi innovates endlessly but with a purpose and a plan in mind. Its D10X programme helps entrepreneurially minded employees to test and launch their own business ideas. Citi Ventures, its venture capital arm, invests in startups with the potential to help the bank and its clients thrive in a world of change.
And how it invests in tech points to its own long-term strategic thinking on digital. In April 2021, Citi announced plans to build a new industry-leading independent data and trading platform for structured credit and underlying collateral markets. The platform, slated for launch in the second half of 2022, aims to address some of the biggest challenges in the collateralized loan obligation and loan markets, notably efficiency, liquidity and cost of execution.
Another new service set for launch in the coming months is Payments Express, a cloud-based, application programming interface-enabled instant payments platform that targets e-business clients. Citi aims to go live in two big markets by the end of 2022, then to scale that up to 30 markets over the next few years, meeting more than 90% of expected flows.
Everything Citi does with digital is designed and implemented with care. It plans and engineers well, sandboxing ideas, then rolling them out to a wider audience when they are ready. Nothing is done with ‘small’ in mind: new services are designed to slot into or to build new layers on top of the bank’s global platform.
