How Digital, Data And AI Are Transforming Customer Experience At Citi

Citigroup (Citi) is an American multinational investment bank and financial services company based in New York City, and the third-largest banking institution in the United States by assets. Founded as City Bank of New York, the company was chartered by the state of New York on June 16, 1812. As it grew, the bank became an innovator in financial services, becoming the first major U.S. bank to offer compound interest on savings (1921); unsecured personal loans (1928); customer checking accounts (1936) and the negotiable certificate of deposit (1961). In 1974, it adopted Citicorp as its corporate name, with the bank being formally renamed Citibank in 1976. I recently spoke with Michael Naggar, chief information officer and chief digital officer for U.S. personal banking, on the present digital transformation and innovation journey of Citi during a period of rapidly expanding data and AI capabilities. I asked Naggar how his career journey led him to his current responsibilities. “My career started 35 years ago on the tech side of the house,” He explained. “My first role was at Verizon as a developer — I spent almost 20 years in the telecom industry and experienced the dot com boom in the late 90s. “I followed one of my mentors into banking to join Citi in 2018,” he continued, explaining his current role. “I oversee teams that manage digital and tech experiences for retail products, branded cards and lending, and retail credit cards.” Naggar explains his mandate and philosophy: “One of the first steps I took in this new role was bringing technology and digital experiences together. One of the things I always say to my team: ‘Simple is hard.’ But that is our goal when we introduce new digital experiences for our clients — make it simple and ensure that it ties to the business model.”

Driving Business Value From Digital Transformation At Citi

Citi is reporting strong engagement in digital offerings with its customers. “As we pointed out in our Q1 earnings call earlier this year, active mobile users reached 19 million, and active digital users topped 25 million for Cards and Retail,” Naggar notes. “Our strategy at Citi has three components. First, assisting our customers in getting the product, which is about improving the digital experience for our clients so they can get what they want when they need it. “Second, helping our clients use the products,” he adds. “This means ensuring that customers are satisfied with the overall experience. If the experience is not simple, they won’t use it and then we as a bank will not have the data to make improvements or personalize. Third is what I call the ‘flywheel effect,’ which is connecting digital and analog channels and ensuring we understand the 360-degree customer experience leveraging data. “All of these three steps have to include safety and soundness built into the process so we can protect our clients and their data,” Naggar adds. “For us at Citi, digital is everything and it’s integrated into all of our products and services. We regularly partner with our marketing colleagues to work collaboratively and deliver the best banking solutions to our customers where they need us. “This is a key part of the partnership between different functions of the firm, like marketing, coming together to solve a business problem,” Naggar adds. Driving business value is core to the mandate of the U.S. personal banking organization. “One term I use often with my team a lot is the concept of the ‘renaissance employee,’ which is one who understands the digital customer experience, the right technology to leverage and how to drive value for the business,” Naggar says. “We hold quarterly ‘design thinking’ sessions with our business partners, because like I mentioned earlier, experiences must tie to business goals that deliver business value.”

Enhancing The Digital Customer Experience At Citi

An example of Citi’s strategy to enhance the digital customer experience is Citi’s Offer Management System, which is designed to automate and simplify offer setup and creation to Citi clients, as well as providing real-time offer fulfillment and customer transparency for the marketing campaign lifecycle. “We also work closely with our client experience teams to identify pain points from our clients and tag them to teams and leaders to develop solutions,” Naggar says. Late last year, Citi Retail Services launched Citi Pay, a new family of embedded digital payment products that can be easily integrated into merchants’ shopping and checkout processes, online or in-store. This was the first digital-only point of sale financing product and designed with the needs of both merchants and consumers in mind – using a fully automated decisioning application experience that allows customers to complete their purchase in seconds. In January, Citi introduced Citi Shop, a free shopping desktop browser extension for eligible U.S. Citi credit cardmembers. Once downloaded, Citi Shop automatically searches behind the scenes for offers and available coupons at over 5,000 online merchants. The Citi Shop program helps cardmembers find savings instantly when shopping online across nearly 30 categories, including clothing and apparel, beauty products, consumer electronics, household items, pet essentials and more. Another new digital solution is WayFinder, a predictive omni-channel solution in the Citi Mobile App that helps customers find what they need more quickly and connects them to best-practice Citi solutions. It can predict why the customer is visiting and offer up a one-click action to go directly into completing that task. Wayfinder can also predict the customer’s next best actions. Naggar notes, “64% of the highly engaged digital customers who call Citi to replace their card do so within one hour of locking their card digitally, showing that even very savvy customers have trouble self-servicing during scenarios with strong emotions. “Since the launch, there have been 33% fewer calls about replacing a card, more customers replacing their cards digitally and a higher spend during the replace card period than before,” he notes.

How Data And AI Are Driving Digital Transformation At Citi

Data and AI are becoming increasingly central to enabling digital banking at Citi. “When we think about AI, and specifically gen AI, we believe that it can help us in three areas: assist, optimize and detect,” Naggar explains. “For assist, we are thinking of how gen AI can help make Citi an easier place to work for our people,” he adds. “Optimize stands for how we leverage this exciting technology to solve problems for our business. And with Detect, based on their past behaviors, how can we predict fraud to protect our customers?” Responsible AI is a core element of the AI strategy at Citi. “At Citi, we’re embracing AI and gen AI as essential parts of being a winning bank in the digital era,” Naggar says. “And we’re committed to doing so in a safe and responsible way.” “AI is not a ‘side project’ at Citi,” he says. “We’re allowing it to be widely incorporated in thoughtful, measured ways and assessing the impacts and benefits in real time, as opposed to integrating it after the fact.” Citi is already seeing results from its investments in AI. “We are currently already experiencing the benefits of Gen AI at Citi,” comments Naggar. “We’re focused on building our capabilities, developing use-cases and investing in game-changing companies at the forefront of AI, and we’re already seeing the impact. A team of experts are delivering the technology foundations and enabling Gen AI tools across the firm.” Looking ahead to the future, Naggar reflects, “I’m always looking across industries to see what other companies are doing in the space — what are they doing right, and in some unfortunate cases, what are they doing that is wrong. The data will usually point you in the right direction — follow the numbers and it will show you where the people are going. “Output from AI tools will only be good as the data that is available,” he says. “Data truly is becoming a natural resource for companies. As massive as the potential is, we’re being deliberate about managing the risks and putting the right governance and risk framework in place. I imagine that gen AI will transform many industries over the next three years.”