For some of the most influential executives in finance, their career paths didn't happen in a linear fashion. Such is the case for Ryan Rugg, global head of digital assets for Citi's treasury and trade solutions group. (Citi has since renamed the TTS group and Rugg's title is now global head of digital assets, services.) A decade ago, while working at blockchain startup R3, Rugg was given a challenge — to create the future of networks. It's taken some time, but that goal is now within her sight at Citi.
After leaving R3 as its global head of industry in 2020, Rugg became head of IBM's America's blockchain team before joining Citi four years ago, where she manages 11 employees at the $2.65 trillion-asset bank, including nine direct reports. Rugg reports to Biswarup Chatterjee, global head of partnerships and innovation for Citi Services.
"You've seen these disruptive technologies—AI, blockchain and so forth—come into our space, so either you embrace it, or you have the potential of losing business in the future," Rugg said in an interview. "Citi's definitely been leaning in, and it's not just this year, it's been leaning in across the board on this. You're going to have the ebbs and flows, and crypto winters, but again, this is foundational infrastructure that is creating the future of networks."
Part of that foundational infrastructure is Citi Token Services, developed under Rugg's leadership, which allows the bank's customers to move nearly $1 billion a day in tokenized bank deposits. Rugg scaled the CTS framework to
The impetus came, in part, from Citi's survey of its largest Fortune 500 company executives to identify road blocks in everyday business, Rugg said. The overwhelming response was a desire for a 24/7 digital cash network. A key group of early adopters has been e-commerce platforms that need to send money to Asia regardless of the day or time, Rugg said.
"Think of the whole supply chain," she said. "The whole real-time economy that we talked about for so long, it's actually coming to fruition."
Rugg's division sits within Citi Services, which reported an 8% year-over-year revenue increase in
Yet Rugg concedes that while there are adventurous companies willing to try out the new tech, most of Citi's large enterprise customers aren't ready for real-time payments let alone tokenized digital cash, but that represents "a massive opportunity to grow," she said.
For now, Rugg is focused on building out the digital cash capability of Citi Token Services before moving on to other areas like tokenized real-world assets or on-chain collateral management. In previous positions she saw firsthand how moving too fast to cover too much ground can hinder progress.
"This industry loves to talk about interoperability," she said. "The way that I've actually seen it being operationalized is it needs to be interoperable with your traditional business." That means integrating digital systems into legacy ones so that cash can move on chain and vice versa.
"The end users aren't going to be accepting tokens right now, so you have to be able to have that fungibility between cash tools," she said. "The way that this technology is going to scale at the end of the day is you don't even know you're using a blockchain." Just as users don't care what cloud service they're using, "you actually care about the instantaneous movement and that frictionless kind of commerce" blockchain allows, she said.
