American investment banking and financial services firm Citi has signed a multi-year contract with Google Cloud to use its cloud computing and artificial intelligence (AI) offerings.
The agreement will see Citi migrate several workloads and applications to Google Cloud, and use Google Cloud's Vertex AI platform.
Citi further hopes to use Google Cloud's offerings to streamline its employee workflows, and will use the cloud provider for high-performance computing (HPC), related to its Markets business which requires millions of computations daily.
"Citi is on a mission to modernize our infrastructure and increase our safety and soundness so that our businesses can continue to serve our clients with speed and agility," said Tim Ryan, head of technology and business enablement for Citi. "Leveraging Google Cloud opens up a whole new frontier for us in how we can run applications with faster and more comprehensive outputs, and provide our colleagues with the tools they need to deliver for our clients."
The company will use the Vertex AI platform for generative AI capabilities, including for Citi's developer toolkits, document processing and for its customer service teams.
"Our strategic partnership with Citi to continue to modernize its technology infrastructure and drive enterprise-wide innovation underscores Google Cloud's commitment to helping the financial services industry transform with cloud and AI technology," said Thomas Kurian, Google Cloud CEO. "By combining Citi's deep banking and customer experience expertise with Google Cloud's leading cloud and AI capabilities, we can deliver significant benefits to Citi's clients and employees."
Citi has long been consolidating its IT footprint. In 2023, DCD reported that the bank was building out two of its data centers in Texas. The company at one point had as many as 70 data centers but consolidated down to around 20 in 2012.
DCD has reached out to Citi to find out if the cloud deal will mean further consolidation of its data centers, and how many it intends to continue operating.
Earlier this month, CIO Dive reported that Citi had retired as many as 450 legacy applications this year alone, and more than 1,250 since 2022. That report suggested that Citi's digital transformation was motivated by "compliance lapses stemming from poor data quality," noting that both the Federal Reserve Board and the Officer of the Comptroller had fined the bank $60.6 million and $75 million, respectively, in July.
Citi's CEO Jane Fraser said during the bank's Q3 2024 earnings call: “The transformation reverses historic underinvestment in Citi’s infrastructure. It enhances our risk and control environment and it’s a strategic overhaul, as we’ve talked about, that goes well beyond the consent order to simplify and to strengthen Citi to the benefit of all of the stakeholders we have.”
Fraser added that they had been able to reduce data center costs by migrating workloads to private cloud and had streamlined its public cloud processes, reducing application migration time “from over seven weeks to two weeks.”