At Citi, Debopama Sen has been a key actor in the international bank’s evolving payments plays since becoming global head of payments for Citi Services, on the bank’s institutional client side in 2023.
In that role, she caters to a pack of diverse clients with different needs, across corporate, public sector, e-commerce and bank clienteles. And now she’s fielding demands for ever more complex tools in the fast-changing payments sphere.
In an interview this month, Sen talked about how she’s incorporating the new plays, such as stablecoins, real-time transactions and agentic commerce, into her bank’s offerings and trying to respond to clients’ changing needs. On the instant payments front, Citi joined the Federal Reserve’s real-time payment system FedNow last year.
Increasingly, Citi is locking arms with other payments players to deliver those enhanced services. It has initiated partnerships with Mastercard, Coinbase and Euronet Worldwide’s Dandelion over the past two years, Sen noted.
Over her three decades of work for the bank, Sen has gained experience in other parts of the world, including India and Singapore, where payments have had varied growth patterns. In the past several years, she has brought that experience to her new post at the company’s home base in New York City.
Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
PAYMENTS DIVE: Give me a view of the Citigroup payments world, from the institutional side of the bank’s business.
DEBOPAMA SEN: A year or so ago we really took our U.S. dollar clearing and made it a 24/7 capability. ... About 300 banks across 40 countries now use this capability. ... This has now become something that our clients are adopting at scale.
We launched [the Citi Express instant payments capability] about a couple of years ago. It's now live in 22 markets. We had said, strategically, we want this to be in 30 markets, which make up about 95% of global e-commerce volumes, and we are well on our way there.
Citi has joined The Clearing House real-time RTP network and, more recently, the Federal Reserve’s FedNow real-time payments system. How do those systems compare?
RTP has obviously been around longer, so you have many large institutional players that are very much on RTP. But as we are seeing FedNow get significant adoption with many of the banks around the country, we're seeing more and more use cases emerge. So for example, a couple of very popular use cases for us are around the gig economy. ... I'm quite optimistic about the future of instant payments, both in the U.S. and globally.
What else are you seeing in the stablecoin realm?
When you look at the larger cross-section of our corporate and financial institution clients, I think they're very much exploring. They're looking to us, in a way, as a trusted adviser, to sort of give them a sense of what's happening around the world, [answering questions like]: ‘What is the regulatory clarity?’ ‘What are the risk aspects?’ ‘What are the technological aspects?’ But most importantly, I think they're looking for us to really be that access, so that we use our experience to be able to connect to all this payment optionality.
Would Citi make acquisitions to drive deeper into some of these fintech areas, like stablecoins?
We have a long history of collaborating with fintech players and third-party players and also serving them, because very often we are their sort of primary bank for serving them in the network. So I would say that as the new technologies emerge, we will continue to look at collaboration opportunities.
How is the geopolitical environment changing Citi’s cross-border strategy, if at all?
One of our strengths really is our global coverage, and we are not heavy in any particular regions. Obviously, the U.S. is our home market, so this is a huge area of focus, but if you look globally, we are fairly well spread out. ... We actually see our network really supporting our clients in times of digital shifts and we continue to support our clients through this dynamic, shifting world, because I feel that we are fairly uniquely placed to do that.
How is Citi counseling itself with respect to another shift, into agentic commerce?
Depending on the industry, depending on the sector, depending on where [the client is] in their digital commerce journey, everybody's needs are different. I do think that this will be an important sales enabler for our clients digitally over the next few years. ... The foundational aspects of that are having great data and really thinking about these platforms in a very scalable way. That's what we are seeing a lot of our clients thinking deeply around right now. It may not be something around the corner tomorrow, but it's a future that I think just using AI in general, all of us need to get ready for by taking care of the foundational data elements.