Sankar Krishnan

These are clearly busy times for Sankar Krishnan, the rising star in the bank who heads up regional e-banking for the recently merged consumer and corporate banking operations. So what exactly is the Citibank e-banking strategy, and how important is it for the bank?

'The view of the bank is that we want to be the enabler of e-business, and to be the world's preferred e-business enabler,' says Mr Krishnan. 'We aim to achieve this by making Citibank a trusted brand, working with a network of alliance partners, helping customers to help themselves, and Web-enabling our own core services. Our aim is to be central to the e-commerce revolution.

'Our challenge is to get the average guy on board. To do this the Internet has to be shown to offer real and tangible benefits in terms of lower costs and higher revenues'.

Mr Krishnan says that the CitiDirect Internet bank is already achieving this objective with 4,000 new users signing up every month. 'We hope to be hitting the 10,000 mark within a few months, as people gradually join this convenient new service and make it a part of their lifestyle. Once you realise that you can pay all your bills from anywhere in the world, and check your balance, it becomes clear that this is a great facility both for consumer and corporate customers.

'As a group we are Internet enabled in 50 of the 105 countries in which we operate, so this is both a clicks-and-mortar service. Pure Internet banks, which do not have any physical branches, are failing around the world because they do not have this physical infrastructure'.

But for corporate clients Citibank plans to offer something more through its involvement with Aregon.com, a regional business-to-business portal that should be online next month. This portal will offer local small-to-medium sized businesses a full electronic exchange to buy and sell goods, something that currently does not exist.

'Aregon.com will be very focused on the smaller business, and will use Commerce One infrastructure,' explains Mr Krishnan. 'It will offer integrated financial services and logistics, so buyers know the full cost of what they are buying, including delivery costs. We will also be building in a credit card payment gateway and by no means exclude the possibility of business-to-consumer trading.

'The site will be fully enabled for business-to-consumer trading as many customers will be sole traders anyhow. The idea is to allow the marketplace to decide where the value proposition lies, and if it evolves into a B2C rather than a B2B portal than we will not be worried'.

Meantime, Citibank is also busy evaluating mobile commerce and how that can be integrated into its existing e-banking model, and how to handle e-billing for its corporate clients. 'It makes little sense to issue a paper bill to people who are paying through the Internet,' notes Mr Krishnan.

'We have the advantage of being able to pick Citibank solutions from other parts of the world for introduction here, and can come up with user-friendly solutions to see if the market will accept them. It is up to our clients to decide what sort