Workers across Wall Street are eager to see how AI will impact their jobs. The answer for America's fourth-largest bank is now a little clearer.
Shadman Zafar, co-chief information officer at Citi, is bringing a new era of AI to the bank. But it is not shaped by a single transformation project. Instead, he is betting that small, incremental and sometimes “boring” moves will have the biggest impact on the bank's overall efficiency.
“Let's get out of the lab and go to the factory floor. Let's get everyone to use it for small little things,” Zafar told Business Insider. “It’s important to put your heart and soul into everything you do, which has a huge cumulative impact.”
AI will change the jobs of nearly every Citi employee and “sustainably change the way we work for decades to come,” Zafar said. However, it will be a long, multi-year process. Zafar opens up about his handbook on AI, which is already underway in banks. The four-part plan impacts everyone from technology and operations to assets and product design.
Citi's use of AI can have far-reaching benefits for banks, all stemming from improving productivity, simplifying functions, and automating inefficiencies. Citi has undergone major changes as Chief Executive Officer Jane Fraser seeks to streamline banking operations and improve profitability.
Zafar said the company has “started deploying AI at scale” since January, adding that it is too early to tell what impact the technology will have on revenue. “We focus on productivity first.”
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Not surprisingly, Citi's software engineering employees will be the first group to use genAI. This group understands technology the best and should adopt it most easily, Zafar said.
The bank's roughly 30,000 employees are already using AI for software engineering, from generating new code snippets to documenting the behavior of different parts of the code. With tens of thousands of programmers contributing code, it's important to know what these systems do and how they work. Zafar said AI could be particularly useful in new employee development because it can read, conceptualize and summarize just that.
“When you hire college kids, you have manuals for the most complex systems at your fingertips that you didn't have before. In fact, this is probably the least famous use case in engineering, but it's probably the most valuable.” ''Zafar said.
AI is also helping Citi modernize some legacy systems, a term used to describe older platforms that support critical back-end functions such as loan and deposit processing and account opening. Legacy systems are often written in outdated coding languages such as COBOL. These older systems may be some of your most critical systems, but older architectures are much less flexible than modern systems, making it difficult for banks to roll out new services or make changes quickly. It has become difficult to do so.
“With AI, you can completely transform that system into a modern environment. Sometimes those are very large projects, but they are becoming significantly simpler,” Zafar said. He talked about working with the system.
The next group poised to leverage AI extensively at Citi is operations, or employees, who handle back-office administrative processes. This includes everything from clearing, settling, and reconciling transactions to verifying and auditing documents and data for loan processing.
Many operational roles require repetitive, mechanical tasks such as scrutinizing documents, validating data, and summarizing information, and these are the main things that AI can automate, Zafar said. . Citi declined to say how many people work at the bank.
AI will also change customer-facing jobs
Zafar said AI will also change the roles of asset managers, private bankers and other client-facing people. Zafar said that as the third group of workers affected by this technology, Citi will leverage AI to remove “a significant amount of mechanical work” from daily tasks. Instead, bankers and advisors can spend more time building relationships with customers, he said.
Mr Zafar said a “big part” of a banker's job was “putting together different pieces of information so that we can present a report to the client”. Automating that process means bankers and advisors spend more time analyzing data, he said.
Ultimately, the final stage of Citi's AI journey will revolve around how its technology shapes its products and impacts everyone from product design to marketing.
“In our industry, there's a huge gap between the moment a customer wants something and the moment they get something,” Zafar said. While it's not something Citi is currently working on, the bank wants to use AI to deliver financial products faster and where customers are spending their time, “which is currently not the case.” said Zafar.
