When it comes to digital-asset payments, Citi’s services business has sought to enhance its offerings in areas that have already been proven, as well as those that remain more exploratory.
That’s according to Will Artingstall, head of banking-as-a-service for Citi Services.
Bank clients are seeing benefits to using deposit tokens as a mechanism for optimizing liquidity or making payments within Citi’s network, bolstering transaction volume on Citi Token Services, its tokenized liquidity and payment platform. “As a result, we've expanded that platform into Ireland and Euros now, as well,” he said during a recent interview.
A more “exploratory” area for digital-asset payments is peer-to-peer. If more people have access to stablecoins, e-commerce clients will wonder whether they need to consider accepting it or paying in it, Artingstall said.
“Our announcement around the collaboration with Coinbase was really targeted at exactly that. It's trying to address that type of client experimentation need, where they're saying, ‘Hey, maybe I need to accept or pay out in this. How does that look?’” he said.
Artingstall also discussed the bank’s push to co-create with clients and what he’s watching as it relates to agentic commerce.
Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
BANKING DIVE: What are you currently focused on within e-commerce?
WILL ARTINGSTALL: In e-commerce strategy, we've organized ourselves around things like marketplaces, fintechs, content creation, and then looked at, what does the journey for them look like across accept, hold and pay, to be able to deliver an embedded, end-to-end service? We've seen the need to make sure that our product sets are fit for purpose, for what they're actually trying to deliver.
No one knows that better than the e-commerce clients. So we've been on a big co-creation journey, where we will sit down with them, try and understand a unique situation they're trying to solve for, and think about that accept, hold and pay journey, and how we do that. Because it often is that unique client experience that's the delta between them winning and losing.
Can you tell me more about the co-creation effort?
We've been pushing this agenda quite hard. If you think about platforms like Citi Payments Express, which rethinks payments end-to-end and how a payment is processed by a bank, a lot of the core features of that platform and how it operates were designed from the ground up, in partnership with fintechs or with an e-commerce client. We didn't build that and think, this is going to be the way we're going to beat fintechs. Our view was, we want them to use the platform. Solutions like that were created with them, hand in glove.
The partnership piece is important to us, and it’s allowing us to develop and build new products in the e-commerce segment. We have some pretty interesting stuff where we're partnering with a fintech, as an example, to serve marketplaces in a new way.
Fintech Payoneer was vocal about utilizing Citi Token Services for [its] internal money movement. Even though fintechs are competing with us in many ways, they're still great partners.
How do these ties drive growth for Citi?
For fintech, digital asset and e-commerce clients, their underlying business growth is well into the double digits. If their businesses continue to grow, one way to help our business grow is to ensure that the products and services we're applying are products they're going to use, because you end up being able to ride a little bit of the same growth rates they have. When we think about growth, it's intrinsically tied to servicing their needs and making sure we’re driving applications that support their core outcomes. They’ve made the payments pie bigger.
We had a view early on that enabling fintechs was the correct strategy. Today, we bank probably 15 of the 20 biggest fintechs. Most of the household names you would know in the fintech segment are largely going to call Citi one of their key banks, if not their main global cash management bank.
What’s your take on agentic AI’s effect on e-commerce?
It's very early days, but it does have the potential to be disruptive. Built into a search engine or built into an artificial intelligence app, you can ask it to figure out where the cheapest price is and execute that transaction. You could see a significant shift in how consumers shop. That means things for different groups.
One is, if you're the merchant on the end of that transaction – or in our scenario, as a bank, as the acquirer – you need to be coded into the protocols that it makes sense to be supporting on the back of agentic. Agentic protocols are about how their bots interact with the actual merchant’s website.
But the second is, it probably means that platform businesses themselves could fundamentally shift. If you're a marketplace player today who enjoys everybody logging on and using your platform only, you may have more than one sales channel going forward. One sales channel would be that you are connected into other agentic AI protocols, and another might be, are you offering your own agentic tool that allows substitution of your products but still keeps you in the payment and settlement flow because you're part of the end transaction?
From a bank perspective, especially for Citi, who has got a lot of access to large-scale corporates, there's opportunity in making sure that we're connecting to the right protocols and engaging in the right way with agentic.
I'm watching adoption closely. If you look at the platforms dominating usage today, and you started to see user engagement go down and it shifts to AI chat protocols or onto search – those types of scenarios would be early indicators there's some groundswell happening.
Also, are the wallet providers potentially sleeping giants in the agentic race, and rather than thinking about the settlement happening on platforms, does it move back to wallet-type engagements? That’s something to keep an eye on.
