Citi had its best quarter yet for its tech transformation
Citi's great technology overhaul is a long way from completion, but if its current trajectory is anything to go off, it may be done sooner than expected. In the bank's Q4 results presentation, released today, Citi suggested it had the best quarter for decommissioning legacy applications since it began the undertaking in 2021.
Click here to follow our new WhatsApp channel, and get instant news updates straight to your phone 📱.
Citi said it retired 714 applications over the course of 2024. 264 of these were retired in the last quarter alone. The bank retired less than 200 applications in each of its previous quarters of 2024.
There's still a long way to go, though. Citi wants to retire 6,500 apps in total. There are 4,500 more to get rid of.
Nonetheless, the increasing pace is good news. It may even relieve some of the pressure on Citi's COO, Anand 'Selva' Selvaskari. Selva has headed the data transformation team since 2021, but hasn't been universally popular and faced criticism from senior employees over the size of bonuses given to he and his team. Selva ceded sole control of the data transformation team to Tim Ryan last September. Ryan's first quarter seems to have gone well.
Citi's transformation isn't just about getting rid of applications, though. The bank said today that its efforts in generative AI have been bearing fruit. Citi has built two applications that are now in use by over 140k employees: a document intelligence tool called Stylus and a virtual assistant called Assist. The bank has also given roughly 30k of its software developers access to AI coding tools.
Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share? Contact: Telegram: @AlexMcMurray, WhatsApp: (+1 269 237 3950). Click here to fill in our anonymous form, or email editortips@efinancialcareers.com.
Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: all our comments are moderated by human beings. Sometimes these humans might be asleep, or away from their desks, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. Eventually it will – unless it’s offensive or libelous (in which case it won’t.)
