Digital Transformation Partnership | Citi Alliance and InvestCloud

In this panel discussion, InvestCloud will speak with Harsh Kumar about how Citi Alliance has leveraged InvestCloud’s digital capabilities to design, build and deploy an integrated banking solution, now available to wealth management firms around the world.

Transcription:

Noel Zumi: (00:06)

Good morning everyone and welcome. My name is Noel Zumi a Senior Sales Executive at Invest Cloud, and I am so excited to be here with you all this morning to introduce our session and more over City Alliance. First, a quick introduction to invest cloud. For those of you who don't know us, we are a global company, that since our founding in 2010 has grown to support over 6.3 trillion in assets, over 20 million investor accounts. Our mission is to transform the financial services in industry's approach to digital Invest cloud and City have worked together to partner on City Alliance that Barbara and Harsh are here to talk to you about today. City Alliance is an integrated banking solution for RIA's and wealth managers that compliments any advisors, investment services to meet clients everyday banking needs. On stage today, we have Barbara Stuts, Invest Clouds, Head of Tier one Sales and Global Relationship Manager for Citibank and Harsh Kumar, Head of City Alliance. Harsh has extensive industry experience and most recently, prior to this role was City's COO of their private bank. We'll have a chance at the end to ask some questions, but if we don't get to them all, please come visit us in the exhibitor hall at booth number four 10, over to you Barb.

Barbara Stuts: (01:36)

All right. Terrific. Thanks Noel. So Harsh, just to kick us off, I'd love to start with what challenges was Citi trying to address when you came up with City lines?

Harsh Kumar: (01:45)

Sure, Absolutely. Well, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. So basically what when we looked at the RIA and the brokerage industry, one of the things we notice is, the investment platforms and the advice tools that you have access to have developed very nicely or very sophisticated, but the banking and lending solutions were, pretty basic. We noticed that in the private banking space banking and lending is a key part of the relationship yet with wealthy clients. So our whole idea was to take some of that thinking and some of those products that exist that private banks use and bring that into the RIA and the broker space and give you a more sophisticated more holistic banking lending solutions and solutions that speak to what your clients are trying to do. We also wanted to provide a higher level of service, because you have great relationships with your clients. You talk to them all the time, you offer them great advice on investments, but there's a lot that you can do around lending solutions around how they should manage your cash. So we wanted to bring all of that thinking, all of that insight that we have as a bank, provide that to you in the form of a solution and partner with invest cloud to do that.

Barbara Stuts: (02:52)

Terrific, all right. So can you tell us a little bit about the offering of City Alliance? Tell us a little bit about what it does.

Harsh Kumar: (02:58)

Sure, absolutely. So the offering itself is a core banking and lending offering that's aimed at RIAs and brokers. What we thought about was we really wanna focus on people worth one to 10 million, they clearly have significant amount of assets with you and in that segment one of the things that they're looking for is a better level of service. So when they call their bank I don't know if you've had this experience, but you get transferred five times. You get to the fifth person, they tell you we can't help you and you start over, right? So we wanted to avoid those kinds of things. So we've dedicated relationship managers, where when you call them, they pick up the phone within 20 seconds they stay on the phone, they solve your problem. If they can't solve your problem, they'll call you back. But they take ownership, we also decided to eliminate a lot of the nuisance fees. So there's no fees for taking money out of an ATM anywhere in the world, we added additional components. So let's say you're traveling to Europe and, clearly in different countries, there's limits on how much money you can take out, so you can call us and we will deliver currency to the of the country that you're going and we'll deliver it to your home for free, we have free online wire transfer. So we added a lot of value added components to really make this a very compelling service oriented, high end type of offering and we also think that, right now markets are very volatile and people are thinking through how much money do they wanna keep in cash versus investing their portfolio and that the cash sits with other banks. Those other banks are essentially trying to cross sell those clients when markets go down to, attract the investment assets, right? So another thing that we did was we ring fence, the clients that we have in City Alliance, we do not cross sell anything to them and we give you visibility in terms of what they're doing with the cash in their account, right? So you have the benefit of the cash is gonna be somewhere in any case. So why not have it with us in a ring fence format where you can kind of see what they're doing and when markets recover, you can convince them to bring that back. So that's essentially, what the construct looks like.

Barbara Stuts: (05:05)

Yeah. I would just add to that too. I mean, being able to keep your client within the ecosystem of your RIA your wealth management firm. So that way you're not at risk, just as Harsh was saying of, if they go to another bank and then they're being poached to use their wealth management services instead of yours, you're really keeping that ecosystem tight, and you're making it much stickier for your end client, because they can have that all in one place.

Harsh Kumar: (05:30)

The whole notion is to help you become a holistic wealth manager, where you see everything that the client does. And so we really believe that increases the stickiness of the relationship. And when you think about it, once you set up your bank account, you have bill payment, you have deposits coming in, you have a whole bunch of things that are automated linked to that bank account. So if that's connected to you as an advisor, you therefore increase client retention, which we also think is really important aspect of this whole offering.

Barbara Stuts: (05:57)

Yeah, absolutely. Then if you have clients who already are a City customer, they can actually link in directly to this and get the benefits of City Alliance, or if they have another bank you want to offer them the, all the benefits that Harsh was mentioning, you can sign up directly through your website rather than having them go externally to a different bank.

Harsh Kumar: (06:17)

Super.

Barbara Stuts: (06:17)

So let's talk a little bit about your partnership with us with Invest cloud. So tell us a little bit about why you chose invest cloud and what the offering looks like from a technology standpoint.

Harsh Kumar: (06:26)

Yeah, So look, when we looked at all the providers out there we particularly liked Invest Cloud because we have a very model or efficient way of building websites. We as Citi use and best cloud in a number of regions for a number of different businesses, we find we can quickly implement solutions, and so we thought, if we use you we think it makes sense for a lot of RIA and brokers also to work with you, and we've integrated into the invest cloud supermarket, which we think is extremely well done. Essentially it's a module that you can pick out and you can decide what elements you want and you can put that directly into your website. You can implement it pretty quickly, whenever we roll things out with Invest cloud, we can, we can get that going much faster than we can in other ways. So we essentially are the banking plugin model in Invest cloud. If you decide to use this within a matter of weeks, rather than months, you can essentially have the banking off banking lending offering up and running. And as we said, once you have it up and running, then your clients start experiencing sort of that higher level of service it's sort of no fees, all the things that we're talking about. Plus you have the tech piece, which we think runs very well on in Invest cloud.

Barbara Stuts: (07:37)

Yeah, and just to add to that, too as Harsh mentioned, we would get this up and live within six weeks using our I programs, which is our code generator. That's something that differentiates in best cloud rather than actually having to hard code your experience. We can do it very modularly as well, meaning that if you have an client experience, an advisor experience that is fantastic working really well. You don't have to take the entire experience from Invest cloud and replace things that are working. We can just implement directly into what you already have just for this integrated banking solution. So it doesn't mean that you have to move from something that's working well today. So to talk to us a little, a little bit more about the business benefit of the technology and the offering for City Alliance.

Harsh Kumar: (08:22)

Yeah. So, look we think there's a couple of benefits. We think this really allows you to deepen your relationships with clients, increased stickiness. We think it extends the concept of a high level of service into the banking space, where when you look at what's out there today it doesn't really exist, we do this at a very low level of minimum, so you don't need to put any significant on assets with us because we recognize that the clients have assets on the investment side were agnostic to who you use as a custodian. So you don't need to change the investment relationship with the client that can continue and we essentially compliment that with the banking and lending solution. As we said, Invest cloud can connect what you have with this piece. So it works very seamlessly. Finally this can be up and running pretty quickly, and we think this is a good time to do it because markets are volatile. People are keeping a lot of cash. So why not connect to that? What's going on in the market? Have that cash affiliated with you rather than have it somewhere else. So for all those reasons, we think that this is a good time to think about something like this.

Barbara Stuts: (09:24)

Absolutely, so I wanted to open it up and see if anyone had any questions from the audience for us.

Harsh Kumar: (09:38)

Yeah, absolutely. No, that's a great question. So again, we wanna position ourselves as coming up with continuously coming up with the next set of solutions that appeal to high net worth clients. So we're thinking of more sophisticated lending type of solutions where we could have mortgages where part of it is fixed. Part of it is variable. We're thinking of security based lending with the bigger pool of securities. We're thinking of introducing capital market solutions. So for example, if you have a portfolio, you can put a caller on it, and then you can borrow against that portfolio and you don't have as many margin calls and you reduce your volatility. We're thinking about FX, maybe an account with multiple currencies. So those are all the things that are on our roadmap of capabilities to develop, we're gonna develop these in partnership with our RIA broker clients in terms of what they're looking for, where they think there's demand, where they think that could help their business. But our aim is to come up with sophisticated banking and lending products that we introduce into City Alliance and we view this as a platform that we will evolve over the next couple of years.

Barbara Stuts: (10:38)

Terrific. Any other questions? All right. Well, thank you so much. Enjoy the day.