Citigroup today announced a multiyear strategic partnership that will see the bank move parts of its vast financial infrastructure to a platform hosted by Alphabet subsidiary Google Cloud. New York–based Citi, the fourth largest bank in America by assets, currently relies heavily on hardware. It expects the integration to a virtual environment will make it easier to customize its financial pipes and respond to consumers' ever-changing demands.
As part of the partnership, Balaji Kumar, Citi’s head of global technology infrastructure, told Fortune, the bank will also be using Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform to build a number of financial tools for customers using artificial intelligence. Though details about which applications might launch first weren’t disclosed, Kumar says “quite a few” pilots are already in the works.
