Citi Chief Innovation Officer Vanessa Colella has been searching for signals to discern the direction of the $1.95 trillion bank’s innovation and venture funding efforts. These days, the signs point to cybersecurity.

“The incredibly rapid global experiment of work from home has just increased the heterogeneity of the networks that we’re all dealing with from a corporate perspective,” said Colella, who also heads up Citi Ventures and Citi Productivity, during a fireside chat at Bank Innovation Build today. “It’s increased the surface area for attackers and it has, in many ways, decreased the implicit ways we would look at behavior, what’s happening in the network … and that just introduces a very different environment from a cyber perspective.”

With 90% of Citi employees working from home, Citi Ventures, the bank’s venture capital funding arm, has made notable investments in companies in the security space. In August, Citi Ventures joined a $35 million funding round for digital identity firm Socure, and a $30 million round for authentication platform Silverfort.

“Security is the place where you have to be on the cutting edge because the bad guys are constantly pushing the envelope. So it’s a place where we really depend on our network of entrepreneurs, their ingenuity, the solutions they come up with to keep the bank and our clients in a secure and sound environment — even as that environment changes in ways that sometimes we can’t predict,” Colella said.

Citi Venture’s move to investing in cybersecurity was informed by signals at the intersections of technological, behavioral and structural change, Colella said, giving regulatory or societal changes as examples.

Previous signs and trends have spurred Citi to launch new products and invest in new companies. In May, the New York-based bank spun out Proxymity, a digital communications platform for investors that grew out of D10X, Citi Venture’s internal innovation pipeline. And in January, Citi launched City Builder, a digital tool to connect investors with neighborhoods in need.

To narrow down its investment options, Citi diversifies the inputs and looks for signals that seem to be repeating across very different channels, including startups the bank meets through Citi Ventures, corporate and institutional clients, the consumer business and the 70-plus academic centers it partners with globally. “That’s led us to be able to be directionally correct about where things are going even ahead of time,” Colella said.