InMarketing Today

Citi Investor Services has launched Custody+, a suite of near and real-time solutions built for compressed settlement cycles, continuous markets and AI-driven decision making. The firm describes it as a shift from a standardised custody model to a modular ecosystem clients can adapt to their own workflows, spanning real-time asset servicing, instant settlement, on-demand FX, digital asset custody, accelerated tax, real-time cash and liquidity, and white-label platform capability. It lands as Citi completes the US rollout of its patented Single Event Processing technology. Chris Cox, head of Investor Services, said Citi's Services business invests over US$2 billion a year in platform strategy.

Custody has been sold on scale and safety for forty years, and every large provider says the same three words. Citi is repositioning on latency and modularity instead, and the naming does real work: the plus sign promises extension rather than replacement, which is what a risk committee needs to hear before it will listen to anything new. The proof points matter more than the promise. A named technology completing a rollout and a disclosed investment figure are checkable; "next-generation architecture" is not.

Take your product claims and put a figure, a deployment and a date against each one. Anything left over is table stakes described at length, and your buyers have already discounted it.

The CBI has told the Government to make the next ten years Britain's "adoption decade" and put AI at the centre of economic strategy. Its report with Oliver Wyman warns of a growing execution divide between firms scaling AI across the organisation and those stuck in pilot mode: 49 per cent of the leaders report meeting or beating their expected return on investment, against 15 per cent of the laggards. Separate Lloyds Banking Group research across 1,200 UK businesses found 61 per cent of firms now use AI, while 31 per cent say their workforce lacks the skills to do so. The CBI wants a business adoption delivery group, a voluntary responsible AI code, investment in skills and a national AI literacy standard.

In a regulated firm the execution divide is a communications problem before it is a technical one. Pilots stall at the point where nobody can explain, in plain sentences, what the system did and why it did it — not to a data scientist, but to a risk committee, a regulator and a customer holding a decision they did not like. That explanation is a marketing and communications deliverable, and it is usually written last, if at all.

Choose one AI use case already live in your business and write two short explanations of it: one for your regulator, one for your customer. If neither can be written this week, the pilot is not ready to become an operating model.

Avenue Z has published AI Visibility Index findings across five fintech categories, and the concentration varies sharply. In payments, Stripe, PayPal, Adyen, Square and Venmo hold 90 per cent of AI citations between them. Digital banks are at 66 per cent for the top five led by SoFi, alternatives at 64 per cent led by iCapital, WealthTech at 55 per cent led by Envestnet, and digital assets the most open at 38 per cent led by Fireblocks. Across every category, third-party sources dominate what the models cite, with Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, Barron's, Reuters, TechRepublic, TechRadar, InvestmentNews and BeInCrypto named as the most effective environments. "AI trusts the entire signal around your brand more than any one channel, including your own website," said Whitney Hart, CSO and director of the AI Lab at Avenue Z.

This is share of voice with the mercy taken out. A search results page gave ten brands a chance to be noticed; an AI answer names two or three and the rest do not exist for that buyer. The channel deciding it is earned coverage and reference material, which sits with communications rather than with the website team — an awkward fact for firms whose content budget has spent a decade pointing inward.

Write down the ten questions a buyer would put to an assistant before shortlisting you, run them, and record which brands and which publications come back. Where citation share is still thin, as it is in digital assets, the position is available; where it is at ninety per cent, you are buying a fight.