Citi
Vietnam is no ordinary digital banking market. The country’s overwhelmingly young population is increasingly found online. Look at the figures: internet penetration of 53%, smartphone penetration of 77%, 4G networks available in every big city. Not bad for a frontier market.
So Citi deserves a round of applause for beating its peers to this award, having steadily built up its local repertoire of digital financial services. In 2014, the US lender launched CitiDirect BE, a collaborative online platform that helps companies to reduce fraud exposure and improve their operational efficiency, and which is available via desktop, mobile and tablet. It updated that service for the second year in a row in 2016, speeding up information enquiries and payment processing. One in every five new credit card accounts is applied for digitally, while 97% of customers have opted for electronic statements.
More than half of Citi’s customers actively use digital banking services, and it has continued to invest. In 2016, it launched MobilePass, a digital service that enables users of its treasury and trade and cash management services to access their CitiDirect accounts seamlessly and digitally. A revamped Citi Mobile offering was also unveiled last year that included a new app called Mobile Snapshot, which enables customers to view information such as account balances and recent transactions at a glance.
Citi also remains at the cutting edge of digital innovation. In July 2017, the bank teamed up with taxi fleet Grab to launch Grab Taxi, allowing credit card holders to pay for their cab rides with miles or points.