Citi is increasing its technology spending on the business banking side to $1 billion, 40% more than its 2020 spending.

The $2.3 trillion asset bank hopes to use this investment to offer customers faster onboarding of additional accounts through the use of automation, make more banking tasks achievable through self-service, and integrate more banking services in the software that customers already use. It will also improve communication between customers and Citi and help the bank increase customer satisfaction, according to Naveed Anwar, who joined the bank in November as global head of digital for Treasury & Trade Solutions. Prior to that, he spent six years at Capital One.

“It’s the thing that matters most, the voice of the customer,” Anwar said in a recent interview. “If the client asks me to develop these full features, can I integrate them more quickly into my backlog? Can I use more of an agile software development methodology in two-week sprints, rather than a waterfall transition? These are some of the key elements that you will start to see come to life at the end of 2022.”

The increase in the technology budget of the Citi Treasury & Trade Solutions business, which provides corporate banking services such as payments, cash management and working capital to corporate clients, goes hand in hand with the increase of 30 % of the bank’s technology spend across all areas and its exit from retail banking in 13 markets. and refocus on being a global institutional bank and a consumer bank in the United States

All of that is exactly what Citi should be doing, according to Ken Usdin, managing director of equity research at Jefferies & Company, which tracks large-cap banks.

“Citi is clearly in the midst of a multi-year transformation and additional spending across the business, so a significant increase in its TT&S business is absolutely warranted,” Usdin said. “This is an extremely important activity within Citi. This is one of their competitive advantages. This is one where they have a distinct scale from a customer perspective and from a geographic perspective. This is an area where spending a significant amount of money is paramount to ensure that this business remains competitive in an increasingly digital world where the competitive threat is ever-present and growing.

New York-based Citi has been working to upgrade its digital operations for four years, Anwar said. It is trying to digitize systems and processes, become a digital-first bank and make better use of data.

Treasurers of Citi corporate clients “don’t want to call their bank just to check the status of a payment or ask for a foreign transaction rate,” Anwar said. “They want to do this stuff on their own and they want to get answers quickly any time of the day or week. This end-to-end experience is digital first, rather than having manual keys. We’re building it so our customers can do more self-service rather than picking up the phone every time and calling.

Phone calls aren’t going away, he said. “But I think our customers are demanding things in real time, in a smarter way,” Anwar said. “These are the types of experiences we want to build.”

The CitiDirect self-service portal is already international, so “when a large customer wants to transfer money from one account to another account, we already do cross-border transactions and transfers for them in Citi rails”, Anwar said.

But Anwar wants to make sure these rails are modernized. His group is improving its payment options for TT&S customers to include mobile wallets and instant payments, and is hiring technology and product management people to make it happen.

The bank hopes to transition customers from the CitiDirect self-service portal to the integrated CitiConnect bank. For example, today a customer can log into CitiDirect to make a balance inquiry. In the future, Citi may integrate this functionality into software the customer already uses via an API.

“In North America, EMEA and Latin America, we are seeing our customers want to take more of an API-based approach,” Anwar said. Big tech companies like Google especially want to do their banking through APIs. Asia-Pacific customers also use APIs but want more of a bespoke approach, Anwar said.

The bank already has Developed APIs that corporate customers can use to perform their banking operations in, for example, Oracle, SAP or Kyriba enterprise resource programming software or cash management systems.

Other banks, including Silicon Valley Bank and Wells Fargo, offer businesses API-based services, also specifically designed to attract tech companies. Citi may have a head start.

“Citi has long been a leader in both its digital online solution CitiDirect and connectivity solutions in CitiConnect,” said Patricia Hines, head of corporate banking at Celent. “They were the first players in the API space and one of the few global banks to offer a full suite of commercial banking APIs across their entire global footprint. The expansion of Citi’s API portal functionality tracks industry leaders such as Twitter and Plaid. I see Citi ahead of Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs and others when it comes to developer portal user experience.”

Anwar says what makes Citi different is the scale of its network.

“If you go to our developer portal today, across our payment, liquidity, and commerce products, we have over 90 APIs already connected through our CitiConnect platform,” he said. “When a treasurer comes to see us, he is looking for a global solution to be able to transfer more money between the accounts of different entities that he has in different countries. They don’t want to deploy a solution for North America with one bank and in Asia another bank, and in Europe another bank.

Citi’s APIs are available in multiple languages ​​and use XML standards.

“We want to make sure that when we build the interfaces for our customers on CitiDirect, they’re as good as what you get from a customer experience when you’re sitting in an Uber or booking through Airbnb.”

The bank is moving towards modern standards such as the OpenAPI specification version 3, which makes it easier to understand and use APIs, and the JSON data interchange format, which makes it easier to share data between applications and waiters.

“We want to make sure we meet developers where they are,” Anwar said, rather than sticking to older programming languages ​​that younger developers are likely unfamiliar with.

Citi also participates in standards working groups within the Swift Network and API organizations. Anwar’s former employer, Capital One, is also heavily involved in standards groups, particularly in the open source community.

“Citi is really starting to think like a technology company, rather than a traditional bank,” Anwar said. “And that’s where the investment opportunity comes in, because we want to work with these working groups, to make sure we’re at the forefront rather than lagging behind,” as part of the regulatory requirements.

Its developers create the ability for customers to try out APIs before deploying them.

“It’s kind of like the nimble example of, you can window shop before you actually buy something,” Anwar said.

Anwar’s group is also involved in issuing central bank digital currencies. It is one of 33 banks integrated into eNaira, the digital coin that the Central Bank of Nigeria launched in October. It works with other governments to launch their own central bank currencies.

“These are places where we invest, investigate, pilot and explore, when it comes to digital assets,” Anwar said. “Central bank digital currencies will eliminate the latency and friction associated with the movement of money and reduce the cost of the transaction.”