Citi to launch 24/7 Clearing in Q4 2022 for cross-border payments

With 24/7 USD Clearing, Citi’s clients will be enabled to make USD payments 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, including holidays, across Citi’s 1,500 financial institution customers globally.

The service will first start with institutional clients, with other client segments being expected to be included shortly after. Furthermore, no implementation or adoption of new technology or proprietary channels would be needed. 

Company representatives have stated that the 24/7 Clearing service follows their approach of providing clients solutions that can be used at scale, with minimal investment on the clients’ side, as it will be working across clients’ channels of choice, starting first with SWIFT, with APIs expected to follow.

The 24/7 Clearing implementation is based on the financial institutions’ need for access to always-on payments capabilities. The service will support institutional customers in enhancing client experience in markets that operate outside of the US working days. This will be made possible by meeting collateral requirements on weekends or holidays, processing late-hour payments, supporting interbranch funding, and allowing the client’s retail and commercial customers to process payments around the clock.

Citi developments in 2022

In September 2022, it was announced that Citigroup joined a government-sponsored effort looking to expand credit access in underserved communities, with two pilot programmes expected to launch early in 2023.  Launched under the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency’s Project REACh, or Roundtable for Economic Access and Change, one programme will issue credit cards to people without credit scores, whereas the other programmer will simplify the way in which SMBs owned by minorities, women, and veterans get credit

In June 2022, Citigroup announced a partnership with Switzerland-based crypto infrastructure Metaco for a digital asset custody platform.  The bank was looking to explore the tokenised securities capabilities of the custody platform, such as blockchain-based bonds and stocks, aiming to integrate the Metaco infrastructure platform, Harmonize, into its infrastructure.