How Citi uses AI

Citi is piloting Client Assist, a chatbot on the CitiDirect banking portal, with a few corporate customers. It lets customers ask about the status of a payment or an account balance in their own words rather than searching the portal. Shahmir Khaliq, Citi's head of Services, described it to American Banker alongside Ops Assist, a separate document processing tool for onboarding (see the separate Ops Assist record). No usage numbers or resolution rate are disclosed for the pilot.

Citi's Services unit built Ops Assist, a tool that scans onboarding documents such as signature cards and account opening forms, extracts the needed elements and feeds that data into the bank's other software. Shahmir Khaliq, Citi's head of Services, told American Banker that reviewing a client's deck of onboarding documents used to take a few hours, and that Ops Assist has cut that time by about 80%, to 10 to 15 minutes. The same article describes a separate chatbot, Client Assist, piloted with a few CitiDirect customers for payment status and balance questions (see the separate Client Assist record).

Citi Wealth launched two AI tools built by its Data, Analytics and Innovation team. AskWealth is a generative AI assistant that gives service teams, advisors and managers answers across the wealth business, so that advisors can reach market insights and research when clients ask questions; after a launch in Asia it became available to Citi Wealth colleagues worldwide. Advisor Insights is a dashboard of timely messages about market moves, portfolios and events, including Chief Investment Office insights, piloted with Citigold and Citi Private Client advisors in North America with a wider rollout planned for Q4 2025 and Q1 2026. Citi says the tools will save hours of time but published no figures.

Citi added AI driven automation to CitiDirect Commercial Banking, its digital platform for mid sized corporate clients, covering data extraction, form filling and client query routing. The KYC process for renewals is now, in Citi's words, "fully integrated" with automated notifications and prefilled information, and a "Digital Servicing Hub" centralizes client queries, updates and document submission. Citi says the fully digitized onboarding process, with real time status updates, has significantly reduced onboarding turnaround times, though it gives no figure for that reduction. The platform now covers more than 57 percent of Citi's commercial banking client base and is live in the United States, Hong Kong, India, Singapore, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and Brazil.

Citi's commercial lending business uses Numerated's digital lending platform to spread borrower financials. After Numerated receives credit documents from Citi's borrowers, its AI tools compile the financial statements into a dashboard with liquidity, credit and other ratios. Once the data has been validated, underwriters run credit analyses and other reviews in the platform before exporting the results to other bank departments. Katya Chupryna, a Director at Citi, described the effort in trade press as a mapping exercise to ingest the historical financial data on thousands of companies and automate future updates.

On Citi's fourth quarter 2024 earnings call, CEO Jane Fraser said the bank had armed 30,000 developers with AI tools to write code and launched two AI platforms for 143,000 colleagues. CIO Dive reported the same rollout as generative AI coding tools. No productivity or quality figures for the coding tools are disclosed, and the vendors are not named.

Citi announced it would collaborate with Traydstream to give clients access to automated processing of trade documents, so the two firms could work together to streamline the review and examination of documentation against documentary credit terms, aiming to cut risk, operational load and cost. Traydstream's chief executive said the partnership combines the vendor's machine learning and rules engine with its trade compliance checking. The release does not disclose a date when the service goes live, volumes or outcome figures.