Citigroup is making a push to expand its offering to small and midsized businesses around the world, hoping to double its commercial banking revenues even as competition for the same borrowers intensifies.
In the past two months, the US bank has poached a top banker from Barclays to head efforts to work with more UK companies with annual revenues between $10mn and $3bn, and launched its first dedicated unit for smaller companies in Japan.
It has also bought a stake in Numerated, a US fintech that uses artificial intelligence to analyse and collect data for business loans. Citi is working with Numerated to use its machine learning models to better manage its own loan data.