To brace itself for North America’s upcoming move to a T+1 settlement cycle on 28 May, Citi’s global custody business has made significant changes to its operations. A Bloomberg report (paywalled) reveals that the bank has shifted the working hours for some of its staff in Asia, created a task force that will focus solely on T+1 transition, and enhanced its online global ETF portal.
As part of the shift in working hours, some of Citi’s staff in Kuala Lumpur are now working from Tuesday to Saturday. According to Michele Pitts, head of North America custody product strategic initiatives at Citi Securities Services, moving the hours will allow Citi to provide live support in multiple regions. The bank currently has service centres in locations such as Warsaw, Dublin, Tampa in Florida, and Pune in India.
The task force is a temporary unit formed four weeks before the T+1 deadline and it will be disbanded six weeks after. Its goal is to help Citi speed up its settlement cycle to meet the new T+1 rules.
Earlier this year, Citi completed the enhancements to its global ETF portal, ACES, after adopting a technology stack that eliminated batch processing. This fully automated the entire creation and redemption process for order management and onboarding, allowing the platform to support T+1 settlement across different asset classes.
