At Citigroup , a globally minded payments business necessitates a leader with experience that spans the globe.
Enter Debopama Sen, head of payments for Citi's Services business, who for nearly two years has been solely responsible for all business strategy, execution, growth and risk management of payments solutions for the global bank's corporate, e-commerce, public sector, financial institution and commercial banking clients.
Sen has spent nearly three decades with the bank in roles across its Services business, including trade finance, investor services, issuer services, liquidity management and payments.
Her experience reaches the far corners of the payments world, too, including Singapore, where she worked with many of the bank's treasury and trade solutions clients in Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam.
She also ran Treasury and Trade Solutions in India, and represented Citigroup for five years on the board of the National Payments Corporation of India, of which Citigroup was a founding member. NPCI is the parent corporation that runs the country's instant payment scheme, Unified Payments Network, also known as UPI. (The Treasury and Trade Solutions group, along with what was formerly known as Securities Services, was rebranded Services in 2023. Services is now comprised of five core businesses: Payments, Liquidity, Trade, Issuer Services, and Investor Services.)
"Even though I worked in many different businesses, I was always very close to payments," Sen told American Banker. "When you think about payments at Citi, obviously it is very, very closely integrated with all of our services capabilities."
That means marrying cash, payment and liquidity management with investment and financing services to give the bank's global clients a full suite of money movement services. A task easier said than done in a world where clients' needs range by size and geography, just to name a few.
Modernizing the payments stack
Citi has been on a quest for the last year to modernize its payments stack, which includes domestic payments and payments acceptance, clearing services, cross-border payments and commercial card issuance. Citi's payments business processes $5 trillion in payments across more than 90 countries and jurisdictions on a daily basis, including 11 million daily instant payment transactions. And revenue from its Services business — where its payments business sits — increased 9% year over year as of December 31, 2024.
"Our key priorities as we had laid out in investor day [last year] from a payments perspective, are really about enabling corporate cash management, enabling financial institutions and banks and helping our clients transition their business models to digital commerce, which is a third pillar of our strategy," Sen said.
Bringing 24/7/365 clearing capabilities to Citi's financial institution clients is at the center of that strategy, she said.
"If there's a [corporation] in the Middle East paying a supplier in Vietnam today, if it's the fourth of July or it's a U.S. holiday or the U.S. is closed, it doesn't matter. Commerce can continue unchecked," Sen said.
More than 230 banks were using Citi's 24/7 clearing solution as of May 2025, and volume was up 7% year over year at the end of 2024.
"Enabling [24/7 clearing], and seeing the uptake and seeing the adoption reinforces our strategy, which has always been from day one to really make it very easy for our clients to connect to us, to use the new technology and not have to go through a very detailed sort of implementation at their end," Sen said.
Cross-border payment volume also saw an uptick in 2024, rising 6% year over year to nearly $380 billion.
Scaling Payments Express
Citi is also hanging its hat on helping large corporations transition to the digital economy through its "reimagined" cloud-based payments platform, Citi Payments Express.
"No matter which industry you belong to, your business model is getting disrupted," Sen said. "Suddenly you've gone from a B-to-B business model to having to enable 24/7, seamless embedded payments into a commercial transaction to compete with others and be successful.
"Payments can very often be either the enabler or the reason why they can't succeed if that embedded payment experience is not seamless," she said.
Payments Express leverages new payment information standards such as ISO 20022 to help organizations derisk their payment processes. ISO 20022 allows payment messages to include more detailed and consistent information, including a person or payor's name and other identifying information such as a primary or secondary address, building or apartment number, the sender's town, county, state, country and corporate affiliation among other details.
"As the world becomes much more digital commerce oriented, you also see an increased incidence of fraud and increased risk of fraud," Sen said.
Adoption for the payments solution has been strong. In June 2024, Payments Express was live in five countries with the goal to expand it to the top 30 markets by year end 2027, Sen told investors at Citi's Services Investor Day.
As of May 2025 and less than a year later, Citi Payments Express was live in 20 markets, with plans to be live in 22 markets by the end of 2025.
Six million payments flow through Citi Payments Express on a daily basis, Sen said.
Cutting through the noise
Citi's Services business has seen its year-end momentum carry through the first quarter of 2025. Revenues rose 3% compared with the same period in 2024, driven by U.S. dollar clearing and cross-border payment flows.
The challenge for Citi will be to continue that momentum in a payments landscape marked by rapid evolutions in agentic payments, stablecoins and digital payments and commerce, said Tony DeSanctis, a senior advisor at Cornerstone Advisors.
"There will be a lot of disruption over the next three to five years. It will take focus to stay competitive," DeSanctis told American Banker.
Sen and her international payments team at Citi aim to cut through that noise. "There is such a big change happening in the world, and the pace of innovation is very fast. Even with our most traditional corporate clients, they know that they're going to get disrupted. They know that their business model is going to have to shift," she said.
Developing products and solutions for any of Citi's clients requires a willingness to co-create those products with some of the bank's largest clients.
"Something we've learned over the last few years — we didn't sort of imagine or dream this up — is that co-creating with some of the largest category leaders has helped us create products that actually work for everyone as long as we simplify the access of the channel, depending on the client," Sen said.
This year, Citi is continuing to concentrate on its three areas of focus: enabling corporate cash management, enabling financial institutions and enabling digital commerce.
"For us, eventually the value is when we get to a larger variety [and] a larger range of markets that our clients want to do business in," Sen said.
And of course, there's an artificial intelligence element to the bank's payments strategy, too.
"AI is a big part of our strategy, whether it is for risk management, whether it is for helping our clients catch outliers in the payments world, or it is for how we monitor and manage [or] how we help our teams work faster and better," she said.
