Citigroup Announces A Multiyear Partnership With Google Cloud Aimed At A Broader AI Push

Citigroup recently announced the start of a strategic partnership that will allow the bank to move parts of its massive financial infrastructure to a platform hosted by Google Cloud.

Citi Teams Up With Google Cloud To Reduce Its Dependency On Hardware

Citi is currently the fourth-largest American bank by assets, but as per its own admission, it relies too heavily on hardware. This is why it decided to team up with Google Cloud and go through a game-changing integration to a virtual environment, which will enable it to customize its financial pipes and become better at responding to customer demand.

The bank’s head of global technology infrastructure, Balaji Kumar, spoke on the partnership, stating that Citi intends to also use Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform, which will allow it to build numerous financial tools.

For now, the details about this have not yet been disclosed, but it is known that the tools will be created through the use of AI, and Kumar said that there are quite a few pilots in the works already. “It’s a massive opportunity for us to engage in technology modernization.”

The new infrastructure upgrade comes as part of a larger effort by Citi to better capitalize on the bank’s financial pipes, which currently power a lot of the global economy, and comprise half of the bank’s revenue.

Google Cloud’s managing director for the financial services division, Rohit Bhat, also commented on the partnership, stating that the company’s engineering, product, and sales teams have been working with Citi’s technology for months now, as well as with its business enablement team. While the partnership is still in the early days, the two entities’ teams have been able to co-develop quite mature technology.

Citigroup To Benefit From Google’s AI Technology

While it has yet to be seen what tools Citi can get from Google Cloud and its technologies, there are already several Google Cloud upgrades at Citi, such as the high-performance computing (HPC) capability. This upgrade alone will be priceless due to its ability to run millions of risk calculations every day on behalf of Citi’s Market business.

The software is also expected to reduce delays by checking transactions preemptively, and in doing so, ensure that there is enough computing power and storage for them to be executed.

As for Vertex AI — the enterprise version of Google’s Gemini AI — Citi will be able to use it, as well as other open-source LLMs, such s Gemma, Mistral, and Meta. The bank expects that it will be able to use AI tools in the future to complete other pilots that are currently in development, such as call centers, customer service, customized marketing, and document digitization tools.

Of course, the use of AI and the cloud will introduce new security considerations and risks, but Kumar said that every use case is governed, monitored, and approved before being rolled out for public use. The same will be true with these new technologies, and the firm will especially focus on details such as the kind of data that is being used, where it is hosted, and whether it is stored for future use or active use.