Citi

About Citi

Citi is one of the oldest banks in America and one of the biggest institutions on earth. Spring by Citi is the piece of it that does merchant acceptance, and it sits inside Citi’s Services division next to treasury and trade — online card and wallet acceptance, instant payments, electronic direct debits, settlement into bank accounts, wired into corporate treasury systems. Citi says Spring reaches over 60 countries across Asia Pacific, North America, Europe and Latin America. The clue to who it is for is where it lives: this is a product a corporate bank sells to companies with treasury departments.

The Australian story needs unpicking, because Citi here is not what it was. It was one of sixteen foreign banks granted the first foreign banking licences in 1985. Then two things happened. In 2017 Citi sold its entire Asia Pacific merchant acquiring portfolio — more than 20,000 merchants across eleven markets, Australia and New Zealand among them — to Wirecard, the German processor that later collapsed. So Citi walked away from traditional merchant acquiring in this part of the world nearly a decade ago. Then in June 2022 it sold its Australian consumer bank to NAB for A$1.2 billion, and APRA revoked Citigroup Pty Limited’s deposit-taking licence on 30 June 2022. Cards, deposits, the retail branch business — all gone to NAB.

What is left is the institutional bank, which is a different animal. Citi says it serves more than 1,000 local corporate and institutional clients with more than 800 employees across the country. Spring did come to Australia — Citi’s June 2022 announcement named Australia, Hong Kong and Singapore as the Asia Pacific markets where online card and wallet acquiring was added on top of instant payment collections. The honest read for a business owner is this: Citi’s Australian acceptance offering is wholesale and enterprise only. No SME product, no terminal fleet, no broker channel. If you run a cafe or a trade business, Citi is not a provider you can buy from — which is useful to know rather than a gap.