As Citi considers how external artificial intelligence agents will connect with the bank, it’s not a process the New York City-based lender will rush, an executive said at the Money20/20 conference this week.

“There are places in which we want to go faster. This is not one of those places,” said Naveed Anwar, global head of AI, digital and data platforms within Citi’s services business. 

“There's a lot of demand right now, but with the guardrails in place that we want to implement, we are going to be talking in the future on how we actually open this up to companies to start interacting with us,” Anwar said in a Monday interview at the Las Vegas conference. 

The $2.6 trillion-asset bank wants to enhance client experience but has to consider the consequences, he added. 

Citi has “blocked anything that is trying to access our walls agentically, beyond some open banking read-only access that we've had in the past,” Anwar said. “As of right now, no one is connecting to Citi agentically, because we just don't know what those models will be able to do.” 

A “know your agent” process is needed, akin to know-your-customer protocols, “to make sure that we have the right guardrails and we're meeting the regulators' demands as well,” he said.

Citi, JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America have said customers’ external AI agents such as Meta’s Muse are blocked from accessing bank accounts; so have Morgan Stanley and Charles Schwab, Reuters reported Thursday. Fifth Third, too, told Banking Dive it’s not currently allowing AI agents to initiate transactions in customer accounts. 

Considerations around the financial services tasks AI agents will handle on customers’ behalf was a key topic of conversation at Money20/20. PNC CEO Bill Demchak asserted that no banks will let AI agents transact inside accounts without a human in the loop, and lenders need to inject more friction, not less, with agents involved. Some big banks are finding third-party AI agents operating within customer accounts, Axios reported Thursday, citing unnamed sources.

“I think all the financial institutions are wary of what these agents might be able to do, because the last thing you want to do is to create risk in the ecosystem in which no one authorized it,” Anwar said.

Consumers are wary, too, he said. “We just don't know how quickly [agents are] going to be evolving, and what will they be authorized to do, on whose behalf, and what transactions they can do, on what entitlement?” Anwar said.

Anwar also continues to mull Citi’s “front-door strategy,” and the bank has sought to improve the onboarding experience for clients in its services segment. 

“That was a friction point, for people to be able to open up an account,” he said.

Currently in pilot with U.S. corporate clients is self-initiation through the CitiDirect digital platform, allowing large businesses and financial institutions to open an account through the portal in an experience similar to that for consumers. That will be expanded to other countries next year, Anwar said.

Within that, the bank uses AI to generate document checklists and handle intelligent document processing, cutting “what used to take weeks now down to minutes,” he said.  

Citi has a team within its services unit that is looking across everything from an experience point of view, and that group works closely with an enterprise AI team at the bank, Anwar said. It’s both more efficient and more consistent for Citi to apply an AI use that’s been effective in one business unit across other areas of the bank, so teams aren’t “reinventing the wheel every single time,” he said. 

The services unit has debuted 15 AI use cases and has about 60 more being rolled out between the fourth quarter and the first quarter, he said. 

Anwar and his team have also worked to build chat features within client platforms. 

“How can we actually bring in natural conversations to be able to answer queries so that we don't have to open up a case?” Anwar said. “These are things that clients are looking for embedded into the experience.”.

Mohit Narula, global head of digital platforms at Citi, said the move is aimed at replicating consumer experiences in the corporate world.

“We've all moved on from Google to basically chatting with the AI tools we have,” he said during the interview. “So we're trying to mimic that experience to help our clients get answers when they want.”

The services unit is also working to build embedded banking experiences within clients’ enterprise resource planning systems, such as SAP and Oracle, Narula said.  

Most of Citi’s clients work with multiple banks, and they don’t want to log into several different bank platforms, so “we are going to them,” Narula said. “That's the biggest thing we hear from our clients.”

Citi is responding to behavioral changes driven by AI, Narula said. Banks have used predefined journeys for clients, but with AI, “the client is saying that I want to access data the way I want it.”

“We are following the behavior, and embedded banking is a part of that,” he said.