Citibank’s Institutional Clients Group (ICG) is forming a steering committee to help the bank transition client interactions to digital channels. 

“We’ve had many product-driven digital initiatives for many years,” said Sandeep Arora, global head of fintech and innovation for Citi Markets. “We started a couple of years back looking at these across the ICG, and we were doing this through the lens of committees, meetings and demos across the products. We observed that our investor-client interactions are already very digital, and we felt that we should do more to digitize.” 

Arora will chair the steering committee, which will include Emily Turner, head of ICG innovation and business development, as well as members of each of the ICG’s business lines and the bank’s tech partners. In total, Arora said there will be about 10 members on the committee.  

Citi’s ICG is made up of the commercial bank, treasury and trade solutions, the private bank, capital markets and advisory, and markets and securities services. Arora said that for sales communications the bank’s investor clients are used to interacting with the bank through digital channels, but corporate clients had traditionally interacted in person. With the COVID-19 pandemic, the bank is working to move those corporate interactions to digital channels.  

Arora said the committee’s goal is to create solutions that allow clients to constantly interact with the bank. The bank already offers Citi Velocity 2.0, launched in 2012, which allows clients to research capital markets intelligence and execute transactions in real time.  

In terms of innovation initiatives, this has already been a busy year for Citibank, which has $1.95 trillion in assets. Citi Innovation Labs is developing virtual tours for bank clients, and Citi Commercial Bank worked with Flywire to move money to China when a Harvard Business School student found a supplier of personal protective equipment for health care workers. Earlier this month, the bank’s internal innovation pipeline D10X spun out an investor voting platform called Proxymity. And just this week, the bank launched a free tool called Worthi designed to help consumers develop their career goals.  

See also: Inside Citi Ventures’ internal ‘Shark Tank’ D10X

Citi isn’t the only bank trying to overhaul its digital channels for corporate clients. Wells Fargo is using blockchain technologies to speed up international transfers for corporate clients. Last summer, HSBC partnered with Identitii to launch a digital accounts receivables tool called HSBC DART.  

“Developing HSBC DART with Identitii has helped us solve a key pain point in receivables by digitizing the client experience and creating an ecosystem where our clients and their customers connect to improve efficiency through the secure exchange of information,” said Nicholas Soo, head of payment products for Asia-Pacific at HSBC, in a statement at the time. 

Arora wants to keep the committee at the right size to maintain an agile workflow. “Quite frankly, a steering committee much larger than 10 becomes not very efficient,” he said.