Naveed Anwar, head of platforms and data services, Treasury and Trade Solutions, Citi Services, explains how banks are becoming more agile by embracing disruptive technologies.
Global Finance: Is banking constraining compared to Big Tech?
Naveed Anwar: I spent most of my career working with well-known technology companies, including Netscape, AOL, PayPal and eBay. I then moved to Capital One, which I believe is at the center of being a bank as well as a technology company, and now with Citi, where I truly feel like I am in the banking industry.
While people might think banking is different from the Valley, the core values are very much the same. We both have clients looking to use technology to improve their efficiencies and their business models. Everyone wants information at their fingertips 24/7. Consumers and corporates alike expect information in real time from banks. We want to know what our cash balances are and where our money is.
We are always looking at innovative ways to better serve client needs and deliver them at scale. Banks use agile product development—just like technology companies—and we deliver things just as fast as they do, in two-week sprints.
A bank like Citi, which is available in 94 countries, is bound by regulatory and mandatory requirements within our network, which is where we see constraints. We must meet regulatory requirements and not breach any of the laws implemented in each country. When you take a platform-based approach and want to roll out a consistent experience across multiple geographies, it will be slower than tech companies, which do not have the same constraints.
GF: How will AI transform the way financial services are delivered and consumed?
Anwar: We have been using AI for many years at Citi, mostly for fraud detection and routing purposes. GenAI is the next logical step, which has the potential of humanizing responses. Citi uses natural language processing to quickly resolve customer and colleague inquiries. When I put down my road map, I use an AI tool that we built in-house to collect feedback that is being given to us by clients. Then I look at where competition is headed. I feed that data into my machine learning tool and it suggests the themes that I should be focusing on. Then I do a validation of that with my customer and find out if it’s what they want and if it addresses their biggest pain points. This has helped us take a more focused approach.
GF: How are you improving value-added data insights for corporate treasury teams?
Anwar: We are investing heavily in this space to ensure we are putting the right data governance and controls in place, because your data is only as good as the quality of the data you produce. We need to set the right standards to ensure that when the birth of data takes place within our four walls, we are managing the life cycle, which goes from the birth of data, registering of data, and sharing of data. We also need to consider the destruction and archiving of data and make sure it is going to the right person entitled to have it.
We are a 200-year-old company. Some of the relationships we have with companies are 100-plus years old. So we have a lot of data and want to be able to share it in a very secure and standardized way. We can help clients optimize their accounts and liquidity. We can track payments throughout the entire process and provide them with information in real time so they know when an invoice is due or if they want to move money from one account to another account. We can prefill forms and provide a 360 degree view of their accounts. Our goal for our treasurers is for everything to work smarter and faster.
