“There are places in which we want to go faster. This is not one of those places,” Naveed Anwar, global head of AI, digital and data platforms within Citi’s services business, said at Money20/20.

As Citi considers how external artificial intelligence agents will connect with the bank, it’s not a process the New York City-based lender will rush, an executive said at the Money20/20 conference this week.

“There are places in which we want to go faster. This is not one of those places,” said Naveed Anwar, global head of AI, digital and data platforms within Citi’s services business.

“There's a lot of demand right now, but with the guardrails in place that we want to implement, we are going to be talking in the future on how we actually open this up to companies to start interacting with us,” Anwar said in a Monday interview at the Las Vegas conference.

The $2.6 trillion-asset bank wants to enhance client experience but has to consider the consequences, he added.

Citi has “blocked anything that is trying to access our walls agentically, beyond some open banking read-only access that we've had in the past,” Anwar said. “As of right now, no one is connecting to Citi agentically, because we just don't know what those models will be able to do.”

A “know your agent” process is needed, akin to know-your-customer protocols, “to make sure that we have the right guardrails and we're meeting the regulators' demands as well,” he said.

Citi, JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America have said customers’ external AI agents such as Meta’s Muse are blocked from accessing bank accounts; so have Morgan Stanley and Charles Schwab, Reuters reported Thursday.

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