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Yahoo
23-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Citigroup Introduces AI Tools, Enhances Banking Operations in Hong Kong
Citigroup Inc. C unveiled Citi AI, a range of artificial intelligence (AI) tools aimed at enhancing internal processes for Hong Kong employees. Citi AI aims to maximize efficiency in operations by offering support in information retrieval, document summarization, and writing electronic communications for employees. Citigroup AI is currently accessible to approximately 150,000 employees across 11 countries, including the United States, India, and Singapore. The company plans to expand availability to more markets this year. Citigroup's Hong Kong and Macau CEO, Aveline San, emphasized by stating, 'These initiatives are in line with the Hong Kong Monetary Authority's commitment to promoting responsible adoption of AI across the banking industry." Citigroup is accelerating its digital transformation to improve efficiency and client services. In December 2024, the company launched the Citi Integrated Digital Assets Platform for blockchain-based financial solutions. The bank also introduced AI tools like Citi Assist and Citi Stylus for 140,000 employees to make internal processes easier in the same month. Last year, C also entered into a multi-year agreement with Google Cloud, which is intended to support the former's digital strategy through cloud technology and AI. The collaboration aimed to modernize Citigroup's technology infrastructure and enhance client experiences on cloud-based applications. Additionally, in November 2024, the bank made a minority investment in Pylon to automate mortgage origination and provide interim funding. These initiatives reflect Citigroup's commitment to digital innovation and strategic partnerships. Over the past six months, shares of Citigroup have gained 4.9% compared with the industry's growth of 0.8%. Image Source: Zacks Investment Research Citigroup currently carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). You can see the complete list of today's Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here. In November 2024, PNC Financial Services Group, Inc. PNC announced its partnership with GTreasury, a global leader in Digital Treasury Solutions. This collaboration integrated PNC's embedded banking solution, PINACLE Connect, with GTreasury's treasury and risk management platform. PNC introduced PINACLE in 2021 to remove complexities and address client feedback, particularly regarding technology integration and fraud Wells Fargo & Company WFC also expanded its Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) portfolio with the launch of specialized APIs for its Commercial Banking clients in September 2024. Manufacturers, distributors and dealers can use WFC's API platform to connect directly from their preferred system. This automated setup permits effortless data transfer among trading partners, reducing delays in sending and receiving information. Want the latest recommendations from Zacks Investment Research? Today, you can download 7 Best Stocks for the Next 30 Days. Click to get this free report Wells Fargo & Company (WFC) : Free Stock Analysis Report Citigroup Inc. (C) : Free Stock Analysis Report The PNC Financial Services Group, Inc (PNC) : Free Stock Analysis Report This article originally published on Zacks Investment Research ( Zacks Investment Research
Yahoo
09-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
How Citi's CTO is rolling out new gen AI productivity tools to more employees across the globe
At Citigroup an "AI accelerator" is not a piece of hardware, it's a person. Citi's accelerators—a diverse cohort of employees from all parts of the company—are familiar and enthusiastic about using AI tools, and play a key role in helping the bank adopt the technology across the organization. On Wednesday, Citi gave a glimpse of this process in action as Chief Technology Officer David Griffiths announced that the company was expanding the use of several generative AI tools for its workforce to a total of 11 countries, up from eight countries at the end of 2024. The AI tools, which include a virtual assistant and a coding assistant, are getting some important improvements that Griffiths says were derived from the accelerators' feedback and from analyzing real world data from all the workers using the technology in the initial regions. 'That's very much been our strategy: Get the tools out at scale so that as they advance, you maximize the benefit and the impact,' says Griffiths. Thus far, he says Citi has focused on markets that have the most stable regulatory environments, including the U.S., U.K., India, Canada, Costa Rica, and Poland. Citi has a physical presence in close to 90 countries globally and while Griffiths says that he can't be certain generative AI will be unveiled in all regions, he expects a 'large majority' of the bank's 230,000 global workforce will have access to these tools in the coming months. Last year, the bank launched Citi Assist, a virtual assistant that can help answer policy and procedural questions, and an AI tool called Citi Stylus, which summarizes documents, performs translation, and can compare multiple documents at once. The new version of Citi Stylus, which rolled out to around 10,000 early adopter Citi employees last week, allows them to ask more detailed follow up questions and edit and store the outputs from the large language models. 'It's broader, it's more interactive, and the outputs that it generates are more immediately consumable than before,' says Griffiths, who shared the fresh product updates at a session held Wednesday at a Google Cloud conference held in Las Vegas. Citi also debuted an AI coding tool for developers, called Citi Squad, in 2024 and made it available to about 9,000 employees. Assist and Stylus have been rolled out to 150,000. The improvements made to Stylus reflect Citi's data-driven approach of actively tracking how employees were using the tool, as well as employee feedback that can be shared directly within the tool and, of course, the insights provided by Citi's AI accelerators. Citi's generative AI efforts lean on a close partnership with Google, including a multiyear partnership announced last year to move parts of the bank's financial infrastructure to Google Cloud. Through that partnership, Citi has access to Vertex AI, a singular AI platform used to build AI applications like Assist and Squad and allowing the bank to train and manage LLMs, including Google's proprietary Gemini. 'We can all hypothesize when new technologies come out where we think value will be, but the fastest way to ensure that it's credible is to get a feedback-driven system in place as quickly as possible,' says Rohit Bhat, managing director for financial services at Google Cloud. 'Not just with the operators, not just with the developers, but with the end users.' Citi's Griffiths says there's so much innovation in the market that he wanted the optionality of a multi-modal strategy from a variety of AI hyperscalers, though his strong preference is for closed-source, which restricts access to the source code. Beyond bolstering employee excitement about generative AI, Griffiths is also working to integrate the tools more seamlessly in workflows. Citi Stylus and Citi Assist were both built as standalone, separate applications, but that's changing too. There is now a web plugin for Citi Stylus so that employees can summarize and create Q&A's when browsing the internet, as long as the page isn't paywalled. Citi Assist is being added to the various chat apps that Citi employees are already using from vendors. Griffiths is tracking AI progress by how much 'capacity' Citi is creating, which he explains is a usage-based metric. When Citi launches a tool, it looks at if a human did the work 100 times, and it costs 'X,' and for AI it costs 'Y,' Citi can then calculate the potential financial gains that can be accrued by launching these productivity tools. Griffiths is also developing multi-step agentic workflows that could, in one example, take a summary, translate it, and create presentation slides. The technology isn't reliable enough yet for prime time, but he says the large language models' reasoning capabilities are getting better. 'The agentic model is becoming much more viable,' says Griffiths, who expects the most significant gains will be with developers. Citi, which spends about $12 billion annually on technology, says its generative AI rollout has prioritized tools that can be launched horizontally across all parts of the business, including wealth management and front-office banking. But a parallel path has emerged where Citi will also develop job-specific AI tools that can be tailored differently for developers, customer service, sales and marketing, and more. 'We need a set of targeted solutions, but ultimately the end result is the same,' says Griffiths. 'There are things that people are doing today that they will be much more efficient at doing in the future.' John Kell Send thoughts or suggestions to CIO Intelligence here. 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