Citi Retail Services monitors client feedback to drive innovation efforts, Terry O’Neil, head of connected commerce and strategic growth for Citi Retail Services, told Bank Automation News. 

In a 2023 Citi survey, 85% of respondents agreed that retailers need flexible payment options at checkout, O’Neil told BAN. To meet that need, the $2.4 trillion Citi launched Citi Pay in 2023.  

“The use of our Citi Pay offerings support this finding that consumers are looking for greater flexibility at checkout,” he said.

In an interview with Bank Automation News, O’Neil discussed the growth of Citi Pay, innovation efforts within Citi Retail Services and how he leads his team with ongoing consumer feedback in mind. What follows is an edited version of that conversation. 

Bank Automation News: How do insights help your team innovate around client needs? 

Terry O’Neil:  The needs of our merchant partners and consumers are at the core of every Citi Pay innovation and we’re committed to ongoing dialogue with partners and customers to ensure our products continually evolve to meet their dynamic needs. This means that during the development of Citi Pay, countless hours were spent talking to merchants and consumers to ensure their needs were being understood and delivered on. Research found that both merchants and consumers were looking for three key things in payment products: flexibility, security, and ease of use. Citi Pay products meet all of these criteria.  

While we launched Citi Pay in 2023, we continue to listen to customer and merchant feedback to enhance our products. With a deliberate focus on flexibility, we designed the Citi Pay products and platform to be very nimble.  

For example, in response to feedback from distributors seeking flexibility to support secondary lending options to their merchants (with Citi being the primary lender), our team implemented an Open API concept. This approach separated the user experience from the APIs, enabling distributors to host customer acquisition experiences on their end. 

BAN: How has Citi Pay grown since its launch a year ago? 

TO: This fall marked the one-year anniversary of Citi Pay, Citi’s suite of pay-over-time offerings, including Citi Pay Credit, a digital-only credit card and dedicated line of credit, and Citi Pay Installment Loan, a monthly merchant installment loan. Since its launch, Citi Pay has seen notable growth establishing relationships with new merchant and payment platform partners. For example, Citi Pay has announced new partnerships with payment platforms like FreedomPay and ChargeAfter.  

Today, Citi Pay products are available with over 150 of our merchant partners, and this number continues to grow as we continue toward our goal of bringing the Citi Pay suite of products to consumers at scale both in-store and online. 

BAN: What does the adoption of Citi Pay say about the future of digital payments? 

TO: Point-of-sale lending products — like Citi Pay Credit and Citi Pay Installment Loan — increase the number of payment options available to consumers at checkout, and this added flexibility will be a defining feature of the future of digital payments. 

Citi Pay products are used by merchants of all sizes thanks to availability through a set of APIs or via an application, which highlights the democratization of point-of-sale lending in terms of merchant availability. This indicates that the future of digital payments and the flexibility offered by pay-over-time payment products won’t be limited to larger merchants but will extend to merchants of all sizes and industries. 

Citi Pay’s suite of pay-over-time offerings provide consumers with a simple, intuitive checkout process. In fact, a crucial component when developing Citi Pay was ensuring consumers could apply and check out with the items in their basket in a single session. This real-time and fully automated decisioning application experience is representative of the frictionless experience that stands at the core of the future of digital payments. 

BAN: Are there any innovations in the pipeline your team is working on that you are excited about? 

TO: We are always working to expand the Citi Pay family of partners on both the merchant side and with payment and commerce platforms. The Citi Retail Services team is consistently exploring opportunities to facilitate greater integration of our offerings amongst our existing partners. We have some exciting developments on the horizon that we’ll be excited to share when the time comes. 

BAN: How would you describe your leadership style? 

TO: My personal view is that the best type of leader is one who leads by example and that is the mindset I strive to come to work with every day. Throughout my career, my roles have been intrapreneurial in nature — working to build new capabilities and businesses within large, well-established financial service leaders. This type of experience has led me to define my leadership style.  

I encourage the teams that I lead to be self-starters and go-getters and come to the table with a solution when asking a question. None of us know the answers 100% of the time and that’s OK, but being able to workshop a proposed solution together can often lead to the best outcome. I find that this approach also instills confidence in my talented team when a similar situation arises in the future. 

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