Citigroup CEO Says Digital Assets Will Be Part of the Future Financial System

Citigroup’s CEO Jane Fraser says there is a place for cryptocurrencies in the traditional financial system.

In a Yahoo Finance interview, Fraser says that digital assets provide benefits in the area of real-time payments.

“It’s clear that digital assets will be part of the financial services and financial markets, the future of them. We already see clients very active in the space.

Real-time payments, both in the sense of they’re [being] frictionless, they’ll become more global, they’ll become ubiquitous. Real-time payments will be here in the near term, and digital currencies may be part of that future.

We see benefits from the digital asset space – instant processing, fractionalization, programmability and transparency.”

Fraser says that she is currently working on building the infrastructure necessary for enabling real-time payments.

“For me as a CEO, I’m working to connect our clients to wallets. We’re enabling our businesses and our corporate clients to accept consumer payments. We’re building the infrastructure for retail real-time payments.

But we’re doing so cautiously, because the space is moving so quickly and not all the guard rails that you would like to see are yet in place.”

The Citigroup CEO says that the multinational financial services giant is approaching crypto assets with “appropriate caution” to protect clients.

“I would say we’re proceeding thoughtfully and with appropriate caution here. Why is that? There’s still a lot of questions about how the space evolves. Around regulatory clarity, around some of the scalability, around resiliency, certainly around some transparency, and making sure that there are the appropriate guard rails in the system, particularly for our retail clients.

We don’t want them participating in areas that they’re not necessarily as well-equipped to understand the risks.”

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