Debopama Sen's team at Citi uses AI to draft client responses, flag anomalies and recommend optimizations. There is one decision, however, she won't let a model anywhere near: whether a payment actually goes through.
"I don't see the relevance of an [AI] model to tell us to authorize payments," said Sen, Citi's head of payments for its services business. "Our approach is about applying the right technology to the right challenge. Standard payment authorization is a process perfect for automation. We strategically deploy AI in more dynamic areas, like identifying new fraud patterns and interpreting payment documentation."
It's a small example of a much bigger instinct at a business that moves $6 trillion a day across 140 currencies in 95 countries for thousands of corporates, Sen said. The real question is always "where do you draw the balance between creativity and individual brilliance, and systems and processes and methodology."
That thinking shows up everywhere in her work. Payments Express, Citi's cloud-native platform, wasn't built by porting old processes onto new technology, she said — it came from a discipline she now treats as routine. "It's become a habit with the team," Sen said, "to step back and challenge the status quo" instead of settling for whatever workflow already existed. "How do we reimagine how we can offer these capabilities to our clients?" she added.
The platform now processes 10 million payments a day, and its growth, Sen said, didn't come from a single clever feature. "I think the biggest driver for the volume increase is that adoption has been tremendous. So it's not just innovating in a corner; it's innovating solutions that our clients have adopted at scale," she said.
The same instinct shapes how Citi has stayed on top of the crowded corporate-payments market, Sen said. She credits its continued growth in wallet share, which now stands at 11.6% according to Coalition Greenwich data, to years of steady reinvestment rather than any one initiative. "Services has been an area of continued investment over the last few years," she said. "This is not a one-year, one-and-done thing. It's a multiyear business."
On digital assets, the same caution against chasing a single flashy solution holds. Citi is building partnerships, including with Coinbase, to help move money in and out of stablecoins. The bank is also expanding Citi Token Services, its tokenized-deposit system, which now connects to roughly 300 correspondent banks in Citi's 24/7 dollar-clearing network.
Sen said she recently came across one of the best descriptions of the tension between creativity and systems in a conversation onstage with former Liverpool defender Jamie Carragher at Money20/20. In a discussion about what separates elite athletes from elite teams, Carragher told her he'd always take a team player over individual brilliance. Sen said the same logic governs how she runs payments at scale.
"You don't win with moments," she said. "You win with systems."
