Inside Institutional Payments At Scale with Debo Sen, Head of Payments, Services, Citi | Episode 490

Moving money is easy to describe and brutally hard to do well at global scale. When your network supports thousands of clients across 90+ countries and touches thousands of currency pairs, you start to see a different map of what’s changing in payments and what’s just noise. Greg Myers sits down with Debo Sen, Head of Payments, Services at Citi, to unpack what that vantage point reveals about the future of institutional payments.We get specific on why payments have become strategic for corporate growth, customer experience, and working capital. Debo explains how “always-on” is more than 24/7/365 uptime, it’s about payments being embedded and invisible inside real business workflows. You’ll also hear a sharp reframing of real-time payments as “just-in-time” optionality for treasury, along with a practical example of how holidays and global supply chains expose the limits of legacy rails.From there we dig into cross-border payments trends, including faster velocity across the ecosystem and the remaining friction that lives in the last mile. Debo shares how banks and fintech partnerships can expand endpoints like wallets, debit cards, and instant payment schemes while keeping resiliency and safety at the center. We also cover tokenization and blockchain use cases that are already operating at scale, plus what agentic commerce and AI-driven transactions could mean for controls, standards, fraud, and trust.If you care about real-time treasury, cross-border payments, payments infrastructure, tokenized deposits, and bank-grade security, this episode is for you.