He studies synthetic biology, develops mobile games for emerging markets with a member of pop group Black Eyed Peas, is an advisory member of NASA’s Ames research centre and serves as counsel to the University of California in his free time. By day, he is chief technology officer for Citi Transaction Services. Meet Antonio Benjamin. 

He never intended to get into banking. But when Citi approached him to become the bank’s chief technology officer (CTO) for the global transaction services division, Antonio Benjamin felt like he had found a platform to improve people’s lives with technology.

“My own personal agenda of trying to work for social good and my personal interest in technology matched really well with the agenda of the bank in trying to be a leading financial institution,” he explains. “I believe this creates a platform for good.”

And he really means it.

Mr Benjamin has been CTO for Citi Transaction Services (CTS) since January 2011. Some of his current projects include Google Wallet, for which Citi was a launch partner, as well as mobile and payment implementations for Citi’s global corporate clients. He is responsible for the development of prototypes and commercial compliance-ready digital financial products, including know-your-customer and anti-money-laundering systems.

Helping people

“I can see that as a banker and technologist, I am affecting the lives of people. I am helping them,” says Mr Benjamin, citing as examples Citi’s involvement in M-Pesa, the Kenyan mobile payments service, and PayPal outside the US, for which the bank settles transactions.

Before Citi approached him, he was taking some time out from a career that has taken him, among other places, to consultancies Computer Science Corporation, and Ernst & Young, where he had been an e-commerce project leader.

During this sabbatical, he was coding – something he taught himself. “The syntax of computer science made perfect sense, it became my native language,” he says.

Mass customisation of goods was one business idea but he says he had no business model, nor a name for the company. Then came Hurricane Katrina, one of the strongest storms in the past 100 years of US history, killing more than 1800 people.

“When that happened, I felt that I could actually do something to help,” he says. So he set up an e-commerce company called Good Storm, where people could order customised items such as bags and clothing, with a percentage of profits going to non-profit organisations.

“You could submit a design and we would produce that and sell it at a fair retail price. The thing that was different about my company was that I decided to do it to serve non-profits and the economically disadvantaged, and let other people use it as a business [platform],” says Mr Benjamin.  

The idea was not to make money, but keep the company growing at a good pace by keeping 30% of profits and giving the rest to the non-profit organisations that Good Storm was servicing, including several in New Orleans, which was badly affected by the hurricane. Good Storm was eventually acquired by Zazzle, a similar customisation platform. “[Zazzle] were able to continue our mission. That satisfied me,” he says.

Sabbatical

After the acquisition, he took some time off again, a period during which he was approached by three banks to work as their CTO. “But I chose not to because I didn’t really see the nexus of my personal goals and the banks’ goals,” he says. That changed when Citi approached him.

“Citi seemed to be the only bank that with its global footprint really could have the power not only to change technology, but the lives of people, in addition to the way corporates operate… The combination of technology and banking can truly be a force for good. Maybe that is a bit idealistic but we will never stop having banks,” he says. Interestingly, Mr Benjamin describes Citi “as a technology company with a banking licence”.

Today, alongside his role as CTO at CTS, he is also the interim CTO for Citi Enterprise Payments, the bank’s solution for payments between financial institutions, governments and consumers. He also serves as chairman of Citi Innovation Labs, the bank’s regional centres (in Europe, Asia-Pacific and the US) that conduct research both directly and with academic institutions, clients or industry, and develop solutions. A year ago, the bank entered into an agreement with the US Agency for International Development to find ways for efficient distribution of financial aid to disaster areas through mobile money technology.

Outside of Citi, Mr Benjamin also works as partner at innovation and technology consulting firm Innovation Partners, where he represents, among others, Deloitte Canada and yoga clothing company Lululemon Athletica.

The common thread in Mr Benjamin’s resumé is the central part technology plays in his social ambitions. While he studied communications in the Philippines, where he is from, focusing on film and TV, he never got into that sector.

“I realised I could take charge of my destiny more by learning how to write software,” he says. It is no wonder then, that his hobbies include studying synthetic biology and developing mobile phone games for emerging countries. The latter he does with a member of pop group Black Eyed Peas, together with whom he started a company for which he is a coder and an equity partner. On top of this, he is an advisory member of NASA’s Ames Research Centre and serves as counsel to the University of California.

Data, after all, is data, he says. Combining technology with banking and commerce can have a positive effect on lives, he believes, adding that such an outlook does “not sound very banker-like, but it is what it is, and I believe in it”. 

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