Citi spent 2025 doing what custodians talk about and rarely deliver: rebuilding the plumbing while the business was growing fastest. Securities services revenue rose 15% on a reported basis to $5.88 billion for the year, and assets under custody and administration reached $31 trillion, up 24% year-on-year. Doing that in a year when the bank also began replacing the core of its asset servicing infrastructure underpins the rationale for this award.
The foundation is a network hard to replicate. Citi’s custody platform spans over 100 markets, including a proprietary direct custody network of more than 63 in which the bank holds local licences and registrations rather than renting a sub-custodian. That structure removes intermediaries from the chain and gives clients one operating standard across jurisdictions instead of a market-by-market patchwork.
Citi Services, the segment that houses the business, returned 28.6% on tangible common equity for the year, up 260 basis points. The revenue mix reflects it: fourth-quarter growth in non-interest revenue came from higher fees, which benefitted directly from the 24% rise in assets under custody.
The move to real time
In October 2025, Citi launched Single Event Processing (SEP), which unifies its global and direct custody infrastructure so that every asset servicing transaction runs through one real-time flow rather than being processed twice, once at the global layer and once locally. The effects are concrete: event creation now takes minutes where it took hours, payments are processed in under five minutes, and instruction deadlines have tightened to same-day cut-offs. SEP was introduced first in selected European markets and with the international central securities depositories, it began rolling out across North America in the autumn and will reach the rest of the network throughout 2026.
As a technology-driven strategic banking partner, we are scaling digital innovation to simplify clients’ operating models amid significant industry shifts
Chris Cox
Asset servicing is the least glamorous corner of post-trade and the most stubbornly manual – corporate actions and income events have resisted automation at almost every large custodian. Attacking it directly, rather than layering a dashboard over the existing infrastructure, is what separates Citi from the competition. Amit Agarwal, head of custody, framed the ambition simply when the technology launched: the future of post-trade is instant.
Data delivery has moved on the same principle. Citi now pushes governed, standardised datasets to clients through APIs, cloud platforms and Snowflake cloud-to-cloud sharing, rather than requiring them to pull reports from a portal.
Clients can connect Citi custody data straight into their own analytics engines and, increasingly, their own AI models. An NLP query tool lets users ask free-text questions across trades, cash, positions, NAV, tax and billing. Firm-wide, Citi’s proprietary AI tools reached more than 175,000 colleagues across 80 countries during 2025.
Setting the rules, not just following them
Citi’s market structure work is the least visible part of its case and arguably the most valuable. Europe’s move to T+1 arrives on October 11, 2027, and Citi is one of a small number of institutions holding co-lead positions in the EU T+1 Industry Committee’s technical workstreams. Citi has paired it with a T+1 implementation guide for European markets, produced with the ValueExchange, and the fifth edition of its Securities Services Evolution survey.
On digital assets the bank has moved from pilots to infrastructure. Its collaboration with SDX, the digital central securities depository of SIX Swiss Exchange (which in May 2026 received approval to merge into the main exchange), was announced in May 2025 with Citi acting as custodian and tokenisation agent for tokenised private market shares on a FINMA-regulated platform – a rare instance of a global custodian putting its own balance sheet and safekeeping obligations behind a DLT venue rather than observing one.
In ETFs, Citi became the first in the industry to enable FIX API connectivity between its ACES platform and Bloomberg’s BSKT service in September, removing the need for authorised participants to build their own FIX engines to negotiate baskets.
Chris Cox, head of investor services, says: “As a technology-driven strategic banking partner, we are scaling digital innovation to simplify clients’ operating models amid significant industry shifts. We are shaping the future of securities services by leading with infrastructure. From modernising platforms and data delivery to automation and real-time asset servicing, our forward-looking capabilities are empowering clients to succeed in a time of ongoing complexity and change.”
What holds the year together is sequencing. Many custodians have a real-time strategy, a data strategy and a digital asset strategy. Citi shipped all three onto a network it owns and grew custody assets by nearly a quarter while doing it.
