Virginie Dhouibi, Head of Instant Payment, Services, Citi and Ricardo Correia, Partner at Bain and Company and head of Digital Assets, talk at the Citi Institute’s Future of Finance Forum 2025, The conversation centers around the transformative potential of real-time payments, the challenges in implementation, and the opportunities for economic growth.
Key Takeaways:
- Transformative Impact on the Financial Sector: Real-time payments are transforming the financial sector by enabling a continuous flow of liquid money, moving away from traditional batch processing. Reduced settlement times, real-time liquidity, programmable money, and programmable finance are gaining traction. Beyond their function as a currency, stablecoins are emerging as platforms for financial innovation.
- Competitive Advantage for Businesses: Real-time payments offer significant advantages, particularly for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) in the B2B space. New platforms are emerging that not only provide specific use cases but also empower merchants and ecosystems to create their own customized workflows and applications.
- Banking Sector’s Transition to Real-Time: The banking sector is currently in the middle of its transition to 24/7 real-time payment processing. This shift presents significant challenges due to decades of legacy infrastructure and processes built around batch processing.
- Potential for Economic Growth: Real-time payments, especially when combined with on-ledger assets and currencies, have the potential to drive significant economic growth. Real-time settlement eliminates the need for reconciliation, which represents a substantial cost burden for the industry (estimated at up to 30% of back-office costs). Tokenizing assets and settling obligations on-chain (even across multiple chains) offers a more efficient and fluid operating model compared to the current fragmented systems.
Source: citigroup.com
