Reflecting Back On Mobile World Congress 2015

This year was the fourth time I've had the opportunity to participate as a member of the Citi Delegation to the Mobile World Congress (MWC) event in Barcelona. MWC is by far the largest telecommunications industry event and over the past decade it has morphed from an industry trade-show to a global showcase on the impact of mobility and how digital technologies are reshaping our lives. MWC included more than 90,000 attendees and 2,000 exhibitors giving Citi a great opportunity to interact with key customers, learn about new and exciting technologies and meet with current and potential partners and vendors.

The Citi delegation included a cross-section of Citi with more than 30 participants representing nearly every geography and many lines of business, including Treasury and Trade Solutions, Investment Banking, Operations & Technology, Consumer banking, our Innovation Labs, Global Digital Strategy, and more.

The event also provided Citi with a fantastic opportunity to demonstrate our products and thought-leadership to this important audience. Our TTS product Citi Direct BE^SM won the "Best Mobile Service or App for Enterprise" prize at the Global Mobile Award Ceremony, and we had four different speakers actively engaging in discussions on various topics of critical importance to our business.

Reflecting back on what I learned and saw at MWC, I believe there are three overarching trends that effectively summarize what is happening in the industry and what it means for Citi.

1. Convergence: Competitive boundaries are fading as companies move aggressively into new segments and businesses. We are seeing this across the industry, from leading commerce companies becoming financial service providers; to handset manufacturers aggressively moving into ecosystems and value-added services like payments; or even a top search engine announcing that it will become its own mobile network operator.
   
   As "digital" tears down the walls that traditionally separated these segments it creates opportunity for agile players that are willing and capable of enabling these new value-propositions. Whether it's mobile wallet integration, providing identity solutions, or even mash-up services like our own Money²Health. Looking beyond traditional banking boundaries with a willingness to work with different partners, ecosystems, and business models creates significant new opportunities as well as threats.
2. Connectivity: Everyone and everything will be connected. There were more announcements about "low-cost" smartphones than you could count, and in just a few years it will no longer be hyperbole to say that just about everyone will have a "super-computer in their pocket". As if this shift wasn't dramatic enough, there was as much emphasis on connecting things as there was on connecting people. The "Internet of Things" was everywhere, and whether its cars, home, health, or enterprise, everything and everyone will be connected in the near future creating a fundamental shift in expectations and opportunities.
   
   As connectivity becomes pervasive, the financial infrastructure necessary to support this connectivity will become increasingly critical. In this environment, our global footprint, scale and infrastructure position us to be a truly differentiated enabler. However, to realize this opportunity requires a rethinking of where and how we leverage our assets, and in particular that we develop the infrastructure, culture and capabilities necessary to effectively engage with 3^rd parties, both in providing access to our own platforms and services as well as to become more effective in consuming our partners' resources and capabilities.
3. Commoditization – As the device, hardware and infrastructure business becomes increasingly competitive, many of these offerings are coming under increasing threat. Smartphones are a great example of this. From booth to booth if you covered the manufacturer's logo you'd be hard pressed to tell the difference from one device to the next. This commoditization of the underlying hardware is forcing players to find alternative sources of value-add and the most successful players have aggressively pivoted to new value propositions including ecosystems, platforms, and services to be able to offer more personalized and differentiated value-propositions.
   
   As many traditional banking products face a similar risk of commoditization, the imperative to provide truly remarkable and personalized experiences will become increasingly critical to our continued success. Providing these types of experiences requires a fundamentally different delivery model and mentality than we've used in the past. We have already made significant investments in this regard including developing common platforms, two-speed architecture, and an initial API layer. Last week's launch of Citi Mobile® Lite which went from concept to live in <120 days is a great testament to how much progress we've already made in this space. But, there is still much more to be done do to ensure we're moving at the speed of Digital across all our businesses.

As always, MWC was a fantastic and eye-opening event in which Citi clearly demonstrated our position as a market and thought leader. What makes it even more exciting is extrapolating the parallels from this rapidly shifting industry to our own as we aim to be the world's leading digital bank.