Innovation has to serve a purpose, and it must scale.

That was the message of Citigroup‘s JP Jolly when he took the stage at Bank Innovation 2014 this week to describe the process of updating Citi’s mobile app for its corporate clients. He described the process of updating the tablet and smartphone apps that serve 96 countries and dozens of languages. Such are the details a global bank must attend to.

“We have to make sure we’re not just innovating for the fun of it,” Jolly said. “It has to be an idea that can scale across 96 countries and come to market.”

Citibank’s suite of mobile apps underwent a major revision in early February. The new versions contain several innovative features for corporate clients, such as the ability to authorize transactions, a function previously limited to the online portal. This spares executives an extra trip back to their desk between meetings to ok transactions, Jolly explained.

Citibank’s corporate group has innovation labs in Singapore, Dublin and Miami. This last spot was chosen, Jolly quipped, because, hey, who doesn’t want to visit Miami? It also happens to be the headquarters of Citi’s Latin American unit, which was one of three winners of  Bank Innovation awards at the conference.

Jolly’s sentiments about scaling innovation make sense for Citi, but another sentiment was expressed in the panel that followed on bank marketing in a “socially connected world.” In this discussion, panelists Eve Callahan of Umpqua, Deva Annamalai of Zions Bank, and James Geeslin of Extra Banks, agreed with moderator Matt Wilcox of Fiserv that sometimes innovation cannot wait on an ROI. Sometimes banks must go out on a limb and support an innovation that has no clear business case before they fall behind.

Luckily for Citi, the bank has numerous innovation units and venture groups to test out innovations outside the main operations of the bank — the sandbox, in the formulation of Kosta Peric, deputy director for financial services at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Smaller banks with more limited resources might not be so lucky and its innovation bets, in other words, might involve more risk.