Citibank to pioneer innovative solutions in Bangladesh: Mayank Gupta

Citibank, N.A. in Bangladesh is committed to play a pioneering role in introducing world-class innovative products and services for facilitating business activities in Bangladesh, a senior official of the global bank has said.

"Bangladesh has made rapid strides over the last many years, with the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) doubling in the last seven to eight years. It has done so through export-oriented industrialisation, benefitting from its demographic dividend and focus on improving infrastructure," Mayank Gupta, managing director and head of Trade & Working Capital Solutions for Asia Pacific (South) of the New York-based bank, told The Financial Express (FE) in an exclusive interview recently.

He arrived in Dhaka earlier this month for his official visit to Bangladesh.

Mayank is responsible for driving the business strategy, execution, growth, and risk management of trade-based solutions across corporate, e-commerce, public sector, financial institution, and commercial banking clients in the Asia South region for Citi, managing the trade business across India, Bangladesh, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam.

As part of his three-day visit, Mayank met clients, regulators, and other key stakeholders.

He believes that Bangladesh has the ability to create a large manufacturing-based economy using its apparel, clothing, and electronics industries.

Supply chains are getting redrawn, both on account of a desire to enhance resiliency, as well as rapid geo-political changes, he said, adding the effects are global, but are most prominent within Asia.

He also said markets in Asia are outperforming the global growth rates. "There are markets which are delivering growth in high single digits, something we do not see in the developed markets."

"Across the world, including in Bangladesh, we have automated our customer interaction channels, through which they can provide instructions for almost all types of transactions from letter of credit (LC) issuance to providing acceptance to making payments to suppliers," the official added.

He also said, "We prefer clients to use digital solutions instead of the more paper-intensive processes. This allows clients to be far more efficient and meet their banking requirements without having people moving papers from one place to the others. We are also focusing on providing seamless working capital solutions to our clients to meet their cash flow needs in a structured manner."

"Recently, we have launched the Citi Supplier Financing product in Bangladesh, which is an all-digital, straight-through processing (STP) solution that offers real-time working capital solutions to both buyers and suppliers," Mayank continued.

"From Citi, we want to remain the trusted partner of our clients and provide financial services, replicating our successes from the rest of the world and bringing in our innovative product solutions," the official said while replying to a query.

The veteran banker also emphasised emerging trends like blockchain, artificial intelligence (AI), and cloud-based AI applications, which ensure end-to-end streamlining of the process and delivering transactions in a faster and efficient manner.

As a trusted partner of its clients for over three decades, Citibank has been providing financial services across the corporate or institutional clients in Bangladesh and contributing towards the development of the country's financial service sector with its innovative products, services, and financing solutions.

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