Citi sees cross-border payments growth in Q1 2025
Citi has announced its Q1 2025 results, and while the bank overall saw revenue increase 3% YoY to $21.6bn, its cross-border transaction value saw greater growth at 5%.
In Q1 2025, Citi saw its cross-border transaction flows reach $95.1bn and continues to centre cross-border payments in its overall business focus. They sit under Citi’s Payments segment, itself a part of Treasury and Trade Solutions (TTS), which is reported as part of the Services division.
In the latest quarter, Citi’s cross-border flows were equivalent to 14% of deposits in the bank’s TTS unit. This is a slightly lower ratio than Q4 2024, which is traditionally a higher-volume time of year, but above that of Q1 2024.
Services overall saw revenue climb by 3% in the quarter to $4.9bn, while net income increased by 7% to $1.6bn. TTS, meanwhile, saw revenue increase by 4% to $3.6bn, although non-interest revenue in the segment, which includes the majority of Payments revenue, contracted by -2% YoY to $0.8bn.
The bank did attribute much of this drop to a fee-related decline in its Securities Services revenue, although it did highlight FX as a headwind for TTS despite CEO Jane Fraser highlighting continued momentum in “key underlying drivers across US dollar clearing and cross-border activity”.
If Payments has retained the same 74% share of non-interest Services revenue that it had when Citi reported the figure in its 2024 Services Investor Day event, this would mean it had revenue of $1bn in Q1 2025.
Citi also highlighted its ongoing efforts to transform the business as a whole, including highlighting a “significant” expansion of its use of generative AI (GenAI) across the business. The company is now using GenAI to support document production and analysis, to detect FX trading fraud, in code reviews and to automate high-priority manual reconciliations, including in its Services division.
The bank also gave an update on its digital commerce solution Citi Payments Express, which is now live in 19 countries and has seen 10x growth in volumes since Q4 2024.
While Citi restated its existing FY 2025 projections without change, it noted that these were subject to macro and market conditions, with Fraser acknowledging the current economic turmoil following last week’s US trade tariffs. While she argued that when the current situation has passed, the US “will still be the world’s leading economy, and the dollar will remain the reserve currency”, she also highlighted potential challenges in response to questions around the potential impact to the TTS segment.
Explaining that current client engagement is “off the charts” in response to the tariffs, she argued that if the tariffs lasted, while Citi would see headwinds, it would also expect to see new opportunities, in line with our own analysis in our report on the tariffs last week.
“It would dampen economic activity here in the US and abroad: cross-border trade flows will change, we’ll be in the middle of facilitating that,” she said.
“We expect to be very busy there – along with the hedging and associated financing activity that goes with it – because it’s not just about TTS, this is about the bundle of different capabilities we bring to bear.”
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