The Most Powerful Women to Watch, No. 9, Debopama Sen, Citi

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Debopama Sen has built a career on anticipating what's next in the banking industry, and then making sure her clients are ready for it.

As head of payments for Citi bank's services business, Sen oversees strategy, execution, growth, and risk management for one of the largest payments divisions in the world. It's a portfolio with real heft and scale: Citi processes $5 trillion in payments daily across more than 90 countries, serves over 17,000 clients and holds the top market share for corporate and institutional clients.

Under Sen's leadership, the payments division has exceeded the growth targets outlined at Citi's service investor day, contributing 61% of non-interest revenue for the services division in 2024. Revenue gains have been fueled by expansion in cross-border transactions, U.S. dollar clearing, and the rapid global rollout of Citi Payments Express, the bank's cloud-enabled, 24/7 digital payments platform designed to let corporate and institutional clients send and receive instant payments across multiple markets. The platform is live in 20 countries and processes 11 million instant payments a day.

Sen's remit spans domestic and cross-border payments, commercial cards, clearing, and payments acceptance. This means she and her team touch nearly every type of money flow, whether it's gig-economy payouts to complex B2B transactions between global institutions.

"Payments are often the first port of call for our clients," Sen said. "We help them navigate the transition to the digital economy, whether they're a digital native platform or a Fortune 500 corporation."

That transition to a digital economy is becoming more crowded with an array of options that weren't available in the last few years. Clients will come to Sen and her team to ask about new technologies. When a new technology like agentic AI or stablecoins emerges, Sen will sit down with clients and ask them an array of questions.

'"Here's what we do know."Here's how we think it could apply to you in the here and now. Here's what we think it could apply to you in the future. But then bring it back to what is the problem you're trying to solve," Sen explained

This kind of approach has helped Citi forge industry-first collaborations, including a partnership with Mastercard to enable cross-border payments directly into debit cards, and a tie-up with a Middle Eastern bank to offer 24/7 U.S. dollar payments to its corporate and retail clients.

Outside of Citi, Sen channels her expertise into causes where her experience and skills have the most impact. She serves on the boards of the Grameen Foundation in both India and the U.S., focusing on financial inclusion, and other industry organizations such as SWIFT and Women in Payments ASEAN. Her work with Grameen has involved designing scalable financial literacy initiatives and metrics to measure their success.

"I wanted to make it really count, and I found this opportunity with Grameen," Sen said."It's something I'm very passionate about, but at the same time, they were in need of that skill set of how do you really scale ground-level financial knowledge and financial inclusion."