Debby Hopkins, chief operations and technology officer at Citigroup, spoke to Dan Barnes about co-ordinating systems across the global giant, keeping customers’ data safe and talking in plain English.
Debby Hopkins, chief operations and technology officer at Citigroup, finds the scale of the company undaunting, not only through her background working for Ford, Boeing and General Motors but also due to the bank’s corporate culture.
“There’s some secret sauce that Sandy [Weill, Citigroup chairman] managed to put in this organisation to make this huge place feel like a family,” she says.
But protecting the customers (and their data) of the largest bank in the world is not an easy task and it takes a strong focus on the business with a good understanding, and ownership, of technology to achieve that.
“We’re spending a lot of time focusing on risk management right now, with the challenge of customer data privacy and identity theft. We’ve got quite competent at protecting our network but the real challenge is helping your customers protect themselves,” she says.
Ms Hopkins grew up within Unisys, in her own words, and although the majority of the posts she held were in the finance area, she believes that, combined with a natural curiosity for how things work, they have given her a strong background for running the combination of technology and operations that her job entails today.
Complex challenges
When she was given the opportunity at Unisys to run a product programme for CheckImage (currently used by Citigroup), she had to understand the technology in order to sell it and she says it was “probably the most fun I’ve ever had”. Having run the systems integration business there, which involved bringing together very complex projects, she is now dealing with equally complex challenges co-ordinating large systems development and deployment across the globe. “It can be costly and time consuming just looking after your server bed, what we’re looking to do with our partners is really simplify that whole server environment which is such a critical component of the huge number of customer facing applications that we have,” she says.
The customer is at the top of the list of priorities within Citigroup. “Everything we think about starts from the customer’s point of view. Our customers don’t care how complicated it is or how this system won’t talk to that system, what they care about is ‘Are you making it easy for me to do business with you?’ From there we go down to the specific business objectives then peel down to the process layer, then to the operations layer and then to the technology that enables it all.”
This prioritisation is necessary if the company isn’t to get bogged down with technical problems before the process has begun. “What can often happen is that you see something you want to do and everybody leaps into explaining how technically it can’t be accomplished or how it would be a nightmare – even though they may not be technical people – and that’s not where you want to start,” Ms Hopkins says.
“You want to start by saying ‘Do we have a clear view from the customer? Down to what we’re going to accomplish in technology? Of what it is we’re trying to bring to market and how you’re going to get that done?’”
To achieve even this requires the technology and the business sides of the company to communicate, which has led Ms Hopkins to demand one key skill of those working in her area – the ability to speak plain English.
“It’s something I spend a lot of time on. I’ve some absolute genius people working for me but if they start to explain something, you can see the non-technical people struggling to understand,” she says. “When I tell them I’ve got to explain something to Chuck Prince in the lift inside of a minute, I have to say: ‘Let us keep peeling it down so that people can understand the phenomenal things that you’re doing’.”
Pulling the right people together is also vital if technology is to deliver customer and business requirements. “In the last year we have formed our global technology council, which is critical to us driving collaboratively with the technology strategy here at Citigroup. It’s only eight people and we meet every two weeks. It is critical that we have the businesses represented and that collaboratively we are driving forward solutions that will help us implement our vision.”
Keeping intellectual capital
Although technology partners play a key role in the bank’s successes, “one thing that we want to carefully manage is our intellectual capital. For the most part we want to own and we want to architect all of our applications. We can have strong alliances with other parties, maybe in the coding and maintenance of that, but I want to keep the intellectual capital in-house, especially for our most critical applications”, insists Ms Hopkins.
She sees the key to success when working with vendors as ensuring they understand their role in the development cycle and helping them understand what the bank is trying to accomplish. “They can see the complete end-to-end view. Even if you’re just giving them a piece of the development, they still need to have that view so they can do the best job that they can.”
Citigroup will continue to use third parties who measure up to its rigorous standards of ability and security but Ms Hopkins offers a word of warning for those banks that are only looking at the financial benefits offered by vendors: “Everybody’s looking to reduce cost but you have to understand the unintended consequences of such a deal – as a financial services company we have a top priority of protecting our customers data. There are laws being passed all over the world now that can actually make it harder to utilise the capabilities of a third party.”
Online is best
Obeying the letter of the law is one thing, protecting customers from those who deliberately break it is quite another “Everybody is struggling with this one. It’s about being able to create a second level of authentication. It’s one thing to give a safe card to an employee, it’s another to give one to a customer. But the reality is that we want our customers banking online because it gives them the ability to look at their accounts everyday.
“We successfully and securely carry out millions of transactions every day so we’ve got to find ways to give our customers the comfort level of being able to know that when something gets presented to them online, it is what it claims to be. Frankly, it’s staying one step ahead of the bad guys. A fair amount of energy is going into that because when we used to think of hackers it was a fragmented group of people doing that and this is really now becoming organised crime.”
Technology has facilitated globalisation and this applies as much to financial crime as to banks such as Citigroup. Ms Hopkins notes: “It’s harder and harder to shut these things down. If there’s an ISP in the US, we can get a subpoena and do it within 24 hours. When it is based in central or eastern Europe it isn’t so easy. We’re trying to find the easiest and most effective way to solve this for our customers.”
