As part of the partnership, Balaji Kumar, Head of Global Technology Infrastructure at Citi, said Fortune the bank would also use Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform to create a number of financial tools for customers using artificial intelligence. While details on which apps might launch first haven’t been disclosed, Kumar says “many” pilots are already in the works.

“This is a huge opportunity for us to engage in technological modernization,” says Kumar. The infrastructure upgrade is part of a broader effort by Citi to better capitalize on the bank’s financial circuits, which power much of the global economy and account for half of the bank’s revenue.

Although the partnership is in its early stages, Rohit Bhat, general manager of Google Cloud’s financial services division, says Google Cloud’s engineering, product and sales teams are working with the team technology and business support from Citi for months and that much of the technology they have co-developed is quite mature.

The main upgrade to Google Cloud at Citi is a high-performance computing (HPC) capability that will enable millions of risk calculations per day for Citi’s Markets business. The software should reduce latency (or delays) by preemptively checking transactions to ensure they have enough computing power and storage to execute.

Through this partnership, Citi also has access to Vertex AI, the enterprise version of Google’s proprietary Gemini AI, and other open source extended language models (LLMs), including Gemma, Meta and Mistral. In the future, the bank plans to use the AI ​​tool to complement other pilot projects under development, including for customer service and call centers, document scanning and personalized marketing tools .

Implementing cloud and AI tools raises new security considerations, ranging from where the data comes from to who can access it. To address these concerns, Kumar says “each use case is governed, monitored and approved” before being deployed for public use. This involves careful analysis of the type of data used, where it is hosted, and whether the data is stored for future use or actively used.

“We’re starting with a modernization platform that’s really focused on reducing risk,” says Google’s Bhat. “This is the foundation on which we will build on some of the most innovative things we are building: new products, new services and improving the customer experience across the company. “

Strategic placement

The partnership is part of a broader effort by Citi CEO Jane Fraser to highlight the role its financial infrastructure plays in the economy. Last year, Fraser would have reorganized the company’s business areas to emphasize the role the bank’s treasury and custody services play in global finance.

“The end state will be a simplified operating model,” says Citi’s Kumar. “That’s what our CEO and our leadership have talked about a lot: the ability for us to meet customers where they are, so we can launch products at scale.”

This partnership is also part of Citi’s broader AI strategy. A widely covered Citi report in June, he predicted that 56% of banking sector jobs were ripe for AI elimination. Four days after the report was published, the bank announcement a strategic investment in commercial lending AI startup Numerated to improve commercial loan analytics.

Citi stock rose 1% today. Since the start of the year, the company’s shares are up 15%, compared to a 26% increase for other U.S. banks tracked over the same period by the S&P US Banks Index.

Citi’s partnership with Google puts it in a different strategic position than some of its competitors. The same month Citi invested in Numerated The Wall Street Journal reported that Goldman Sachs had deployed its own generative AI tool and in August Fortune exclusively reported that 14,000 BNY employees were using Eliza, a new AI named in honor of Alexander Hamilton’s wife.

This is not the first time that an Alphabet subsidiary has partnered with Citi. In November 2020, Citi announcement it would work with Google to offer a checking account using Google Plex, a digital checking service that was canceled the following year.

For Google Cloud, the tie-up with Citi comes as the division steps up its efforts to help financial institutions use artificial intelligence. Perhaps most notably, in April, Google Play in partnership with Discover financial servicesthe parent company that runs the Discover credit card and Discover Bank to help integrate its AI into customer services.

“We think there’s a significant shift based on the ability of businesses to understand the information that’s within their four walls,” says Google’s Bhat, “improving the customer experience that their customers have and enabling developers to create clear links. new experiences for their customers. This incremental function change is a combination of generative AI and machine learning.