Victor Alexiev is Singapore-based Asia-Pacific lead for Discover 10X (D10X), the new product incubation arm of Citi Ventures. He joined in 2018 and now covers incubation, programs and strategic partnerships for Citi’s institutional clients group.
D10X launched in the U.S. in 2016 to foster innovation from within the bank, encouraging lean-startup thinking as well as coordinating third-party build, buy or partnership decisions with other parts of the bank and its clients.
The following is a transcript of an interview with DigFin, which has been edited for style and conciseness.
DigFin: What kind of innovative models are you trying to develop?
Victor Alexiev: In Asia, it’s about new products and new services in the ICG [institutional] part of the franchise, so the projects we work on are mainly B2B and B2B2C. We’re not just looking internally. We also try to partner with technology companies as we find pain points they address.
What kind of business models are you looking for in this region?
Finding solutions for Citi’s markets, commercial and investment bank business.
Why not for the consumer side, which is such a big part of Citi’s P&L?
We do have D10X in our consumer business for North America, but not in Asia, at least not at this stage. In Asia, consumer fintech and quite fragmented and competitive, and my personal view is that you will need to put in a lot more resources in order to achieve meaningful results.
Is innovation within a huge bank, particularly if you’re focused on B2B – is that an oxymoron?
Yeah, a lot of people think that innovation with corporations is too slow. It’s true in part, as we have to go through a lot of compliance, sourcing and H.R. checks. But we’re looking after companies and people’s money. But once you identify a product fit, you scale much faster. I’m here to build something meaningful within a large institution that has a global footprint.
Within B2B, what kind of ideas are you looking at?
Most projects are new models of customer engagement. Our most public project that was built and rolled out via D10X is Proxymity, an end-to-end proxy voting platform offered to custodians, that directly connects issuers and investors in real time.
Customer engagement sounds very, um, consumery.
A lot of corporate and institutional business platforms for banks is clunky. Or it’s based on business models that just seek to skim basis points by processing large volumes. What will next-generation banking look like? What happens if banks become platforms for others to create value? What do direct-to-consumer models look like for our transaction or investment banking?
So even at the corporate level, you need better customer engagement.
That’s right. For example, an increasing number of clients want to consume our products via an API instead of calling our salespeople. We’ll still need salespeople but we have to be realistic that our evolving client expectations demand a different experience.
What does engagement mean? Can you give me an example?
We’re finding, for example, that buy-side clients are less interested in reading a full research report. But they’re very interested in parsing the underlying data that made that report. Decisions are becoming more quant-driven, so we don’t need to offer as many products. It’s about helping our clients make data-driven decisions and providing them with data-driven products
Is that just a matter of better product design?
No, it means we need to transform the entire organization, to be an end-to-end digital driver – “customer engagement” can’t be just about our front office. “Digital” is about culture and people.
I often hear about banks changing their culture, changing the ways they do business, the mindset – yet the rhetoric doesn’t describe the reality. At best it’s a partial change.
There’s an increasing urgency within banks in general. Margins are thinning, and there is a realization, or a willingness, to transform. We’re trying to speed up the process by providing examples of what “good” looks like.
Where have you implemented new solutions so far in Asia?
Initially we rolled these out in our markets and securities services business. We focused on custody, securities services, equities, and foreign exchange. Gradually we’re bringing new technologies to spread products, corporate banking, investment banking and transaction banking.
And within those divisions, what parts of Citi are you focused on? Operational efficiencies?
Efficiency is important but lots of departments are already looking at this. I also see at other banks a lot of innovation labs doing proof-of-concepts that may not reflect the actual business needs. The projects I work on all have separate, independent P&Ls, and are focused on client-centered new value creation.
You had mentioned client engagement at the institutional level. What are your clients asking help with?
Long-only funds want data to help them with things like modeling ESG portfolios (for environmental, social and governance standards). More short-term trading clients want data-centered models to take faster data-driven decisions.
We explore questions like what do next-generation pension funds look like? What about insurance? How do we support sovereign funds in managing impact-oriented portfolios?
You’re not big on blockchain consortiums and such?
We are, if it meets business needs. We participated in Komgo, a blockchain consortium for documentation in letters of credit that finance commodities trades.
What are the particular technologies that you’re trying to adopt?
Machine learning, APIs and blockchain are the three deep, transformative domains. For these to flourish requires a bigger internal transformation, a broader regulatory understanding of them, and a cultural mindset change.
That’s a lot. Any anecdotes you can give, to make that a little more concrete?
We’re about to publish with ASIFMA a white paper on STOs [securities token offerings] exploring what it would take to make these go mainstream. Our takeaway was interoperability. A fintech can issue a real-estate token, say, in their local jurisdiction, operating under the same local regulation for securities or property. But how do you open that to international investors, or institutional investors, or create a global marketing capability? The complexity quickly goes up. The same goes for, say, using A.I. with certain clients for real-time pricing and execution of F.X. or overnight collateral. What does that mean, how could it change the market? We’re exploring use cases, doing experiments – to do it right, we have to get out of the lab.
Are you finding lots of B2B technology companies in Asia who fit into these needs?
There are few startups that are enterprise-ready, globally scalable and that could deal with our clients. They need to be either close to the customers – meaning they already have insight, client integration of lots of data – or have differentiated tech that it is scalable, high performance, and can help banks solve specific problems.
But I’m bullish on tech in Asia. We’re seeing the dawn of Asian tech: the technology itself is maturing as companies shift from copy-and-paste to developing more core tech. And we’ve seen more B2B fintech move from trying to compete with us to partner with us.
