At Citigroup , a globally minded payments business necessitates a leader with experience that spans the globe. Enter Debopama Sen, head of payments for Citi’s Services business, who for nearly two years has been solely responsible for all business strategy, execution, growth and risk management of payments solutions for the global bank’s corporate, e-commerce, public sector, financial institution and commercial banking clients. Sen has spent nearly three decades with the bank in roles across its Services business, including trade finance, investor services, issuer services, liquidity management and payments. Her experience reaches the far corners of the payments world, too, including Singapore, where she worked with many of the bank’s treasury and trade solutions clients in Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam. She also ran Treasury and Trade Solutions in India, and represented Citigroup for five years on the board of the National Payments Corporation of India, of which Citigroup was a founding member. NPCI is the parent corporation that runs the country’s instant payment scheme, Unified Payments Network, also known as UPI. (The Treasury and Trade Solutions group, along with what was formerly known as Securities Services, was rebranded Services in 2023. Services is now comprised of five core businesses: Payments, Liquidity, Trade, Issuer Services, and Investor Services.) “Even though I worked in many different businesses, I was always very close to payments,” Sen told American Banker. “When you think about payments at Citi, obviously it is very, very closely integrated with all of our services capabilities.” That means marrying cash, payment and liquidity management with investment and financing services to give the bank’s global clients a full suite of money movement services. A task easier said than done in a world where clients’ needs range by size and geography, just to name a few. Citi has been on a quest for the last year to modernize its payments stack, which includes domestic payments and payments acceptance, clearing services, cross-border payments and commercial card issuance. Citi’s payments business processes $5 trillion in payments across more than 90 countries and jurisdictions on a daily basis, including 11 million daily instant payment transactions. And revenue from its Services business — where its payments business sits — increased 9% year over year as of December 31, 2024. “Our key priorities as we had laid out in investor day [last year] from a payments perspective, are really about enabling corporate cash management, enabling financial institutions and banks and helping our clients transition their business models to digital commerce, which is a third pillar of our strategy,” Sen said. Bringing 24/7/365 clearing capabilities to Citi’s financial institution clients is at the center of that strategy, she said.
“If there’s a [corporation] in the Middle East paying a supplier in Vietnam today, if it’s the fourth of July or it’s a U.S. holiday or the U.S. is closed, it doesn’t matter. Commerce can continue unchecked,” Sen said. More than 230 banks were using Citi’s 24/7 clearing solution as of May 2025, and volume was up 7% year over year at the end of 2024. “Enabling [24/7 clearing], and seeing the uptake and seeing the adoption reinforces our strategy, which has always been from day one to really make it very easy for our clients to connect to us, to use the new technology and not have to go through a very detailed sort of implementation at their end,” Sen said. Cross-border payment volume also saw an uptick in 2024, rising 6% year over year to nearly $380 billion.