COVID-19 and Custody: The catalyst for digitization?

Direct Custody and Clearing | COVID-19 and custody: The catalyst for digitization? 6 We’ve made enormous and quick gains in the regulatory appreciation of the benefits of digitization in addition to a more practical understanding of how to deploy our teams in a massively distributed working environment. Regulatory changes that would have taken a much longer time to achieve were fast-tracked in days. However it’s important that we don’t lose momentum or slip back into old habits or manual processes. Once we emerge from this crisis, there will be a natural inclination to revert to mean and that will reduce overall productivity and the efficiencies and risk mitigations we’ve gained. The COVID-19 pandemic has also forced the industry to think more broadly about systemic risks. Historically we’ve viewed risk as being somewhat business or geography specific. Natural disasters and political turmoil tend to be market-specific. Increasingly we’ll need to think about risk and infrastructure on a genuinely global and systemic basis. For Citi that means taking a much more holistic approach to managing risk on a collaborative basis with our clients. It will be much more about how we manage risk on a firm-to- firm (F2F) basis then on a market by market basis and that will require a much more strategic level of engagement.