Today’s commentary from Citi’s Head of Wealth on CNBC painted the deliberate slowdown of their wealth AI agent rollout as a strategic, methodical choice.
That measured pace is code for poor execution and a stark fear of a public incident, especially with Citi operating under a Data Consent Order that heavily restricts the safe and secure deployment of AI.
It is particularly amusing to contrast this caution with CEO Jane Fraser’s recent buzzword-heavy emphasis on “business process redesign” across the Wealth and Card space—a talking point that feels tailor-made by a PR team closely watching this platform.
The trouble is that Fraser’s grand claims about process redesign collapse the moment you look beneath the hood.
Operational Risk once ran a multi-year program aimed at getting functions and businesses to actually define their processes, but the initiative was long ago abandoned.
Consequently, technology partners have always known that formal, documented business processes simply do not exist for them to build from.
Many leaders in Risk have shown zero interest in technology, leaving their reports unable to define their own business processes, while product teams merely digitized the status quo—automating the exchange of data points through a system instead of sending them via email.
Framing these cosmetic updates as advanced tech transformations is just another desperate attempt to outrun the underlying reality.
It is a narrative built on shaky foundations, and it will no doubt blow up in their faces in the near future. We are patiently waiting.