Citi CEO Fraser: ‘We’re Building the Infrastructure for Retail, Real-time Payments’

Despite Fraser’s certainty that digital assets will be part of the future of financial services, Citigroup is proceeding with caution in the space due to regulatory uncertainty.

article-image

Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser; Source: Citigroup

share

key takeaways

  • Citi is working to connect clients to wallets and enabling corporate clients to accept consumer payments, Fraser said
  • The global bank sees benefits from the digital asset space around processing, fractionalization, programmability and transparency, she said.

Digital assets will be part of the future of financial services and financial markets, Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser told Yahoo Finance Monday morning.

During a larger conversation about Citigroup employees returning to the office, she shared her views on decentralization, digital assets, cryptocurrencies and more.

Loading Tweet..

“It’s clear that digital assets will get part of the financial services, and financial markets,” Fraser said. “Real-time payments are both, both in the sense of their frictionless, they’ll become more global. They’ll become ubiquitous. [They] will be here in the near term, and digital currencies may be part of that future”

Two years after the global bank abandoned its CitiCoin crypto experiment, Citi announced that it was considering offering client cryptocurrency services such as trading, custody and financing.

Now the bank is proceeding thoughtfully and with appropriate caution, said Frasier. “There’s still a lot of questions about how the space evolves around regulatory clarity around some of the scalability around resiliency, certainly around some transparency, and making sure that there are the appropriate guardrails in the system, particularly for our retail clients we don’t want them participating in areas that know they’re not necessarily as well equipped to understand the risks of.”

In late August the bank was looking into trading bitcoin futures contracts on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) in an effort to provide institutional clients with exposure to digital assets. Then, Citi’s move into bitcoin futures trading followed other major banks announcing digital asset strategies, including Goldman Sachs and Bank of America. 

Today Citi is working to connect clients to wallets, and enabling businesses and corporate clients to accept consumer payments — but proceeding with caution, according to Fraser. 

“We’re building the infrastructure for retail, real-time payments, we’re doing so cautiously because space is moving so quickly, and not all the guardrails that you would like to see are yet in place,” she said. “As a banking CEO, I do believe guardrails are important and necessary with a safe, safety and soundness of the financial system.”

Tags

Upcoming Events

Old Billingsgate

Mon - Wed, October 13 - 15, 2025

Blockworks’ Digital Asset Summit (DAS) will feature conversations between the builders, allocators, and legislators who will shape the trajectory of the digital asset ecosystem in the US and abroad.

Industry City | Brooklyn, NY

TUES - THURS, JUNE 24 - 26, 2025

Permissionless IV serves as the definitive gathering for crypto’s technical founders, developers, and builders to come together and create the future.If you’re ready to shape the future of crypto, Permissionless IV is where it happens.

Brooklyn, NY

SUN - MON, JUN. 22 - 23, 2025

Blockworks and Cracked Labs are teaming up for the third installment of the Permissionless Hackathon, happening June 22–23, 2025 in Brooklyn, NY. This is a 36-hour IRL builder sprint where developers, designers, and creatives ship real projects solving real problems across […]

recent research

Research Report Templates.png

Research

The convergence of DePIN and energy generation aims to address modern grid challenges by incentivizing distributed generation.

article-image

An improving outlook on tariffs is positive for cryptocurrencies, but a sustained rally is going to take movement on the regulatory front

article-image

Apollo’s Christine Moy explained how the “velocity” of innovation in crypto has led to the evolution of RWAs

article-image

Warren Buffett attributes his astounding investment returns to only about a dozen “truly good decisions” he’s made

article-image

This report has been corrected.

article-image

Stablecoin revenue a bright spot for the crypto exchange in Q1, as trading revenue dropped 19% quarter over quarter

article-image

Creators are being told to “shill” their tokens and cash in on their “cults”