Citibank, instead of joining the bandwagon of institutional giants like JP Morgan in creating its own digital asset, has abandoned its native cryptocurrency project. The financial service provider is instead, considering to back existing fintechs or regulators, like SWIFT.
Gulru Atak, the Global Head of the company, said that they were planning to enhance the existing financial system.
The bank’s stablecoin, dubbed ‘Citicoin,’ was never launched, but would have resembled the functionality of the recently announced JPM Coin. Hatched in Citigroup’s innovation lab in Dublin, the bank-backed virtual asset was designed to enhance the efficiency of global payment process for the company.
Further, Citibank plans on taking strong measures to increase the efficiency of the existing cross-border payment ecosystem. The Global Head asserted that strengthening SWIFT, which already had 10k financial institutions across the world under its hood, and has been executing cross border remittances, would be a better bet than creating something new.
She further said that the company, with its collaboration with NASDAQ and CitiConnect, wanted to integrate blockchain technology into the legacy banking system.
It can thus be concluded that Citibank is not yet ready to make a venture into the cryptospace. Citigroup would, however, continue to leverage blockchain technology in finance.
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Published at Thu, 21 Mar 2019 03:41:58 +0000