If you believe Citi's (NYSE: C) Paul Galant, the world's access to the Internet will be greater than its access to water in the near future.The New York bank's head of its Global Enterprise Payments group says he believes banks — in particular his own — hold the keys to mobile commerce.
After all, the new digital world is an ecosystem. No one bank or technology company can go it alone.
"I think there is a wonderful symbiotic need for one another," says Galant in an interview with American Banker during the annual CEB TowerGroup conference in Boston. "I don't think I'm as talented in doing what a Facebook or an Apple or a Google or any of these guys do in their core business. And, I don't think they are as talented as we are" in financial services.
The balance of those relationships is simple.
Technology companies provide the user experience around apps that ride the bank's rails. Citi will provide the important stuff — the risk management, clearing the transaction and protecting the user.
Citi is essentially white labeling its transaction services.
The bank already works with Silicon Valley technology companies, Google, governments, health care providers and merchants, among others, in order to create mobile wallets and digital campaigns that target consumers.
In 2010, the Global Enterprise Payments group was formed to bring together different parts of Citi's payments initiatives and create new services in the wake of mobile commerce.
"Our mission is pretty cool," says Galant. "It's to bring together the infrastructure of the bank that we use to make payments — both the consumer side of the structure, as well as the corporate side of the house — all the stuff that we do for governments and corporations around the world."
The unit has adopted the ethos of a technology company, Galant says.
When asked about Google Wallet's early problems, as well as the search engine giant's poor track record in payments, he makes no apologies.
"We are not going to get the digital economy right the first time. We are not even going to get it right the fifth time," he says. "We need to have a process where we are not betting the ranch on everything... where we are making a lot of small bets and those bets that start to create real value for the people that we serve."
Galant even envisions a day when cable companies and mobile carriers will be able to move money through their digital networks.
At the same time, Galant's group is laser focused on providing big data analytics, digital money and digital payments products — envision a method that would allow an online retailer to sell its goods to consumers without the use of a card.
So, as an industry, why haven't mobile payments taken off yet?
Well, there's the infighting at banks.
"We haven't gotten our internal constituents comfortable with [mobile payments]," he said in a separate keynote speech at the TowerGroup conference. "We have to move this to our core business deployment and that requires an enormous organizational buy in, and we aren't there, yet."
Those banks will have to do something soon, because, Galant says, payments technology startups have the potential to steamroll traditional banks.
"We have no choice," he says. "We have to succeed."
Source:
americanbanker.com
