NEW YORK—In the lean years following the financial crisis, Citigroup made an unintentional bet on the future of banking that’s now starting to pay off.
“While Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase were gobbling up cheap deposits at their thousands of branches around the U.S., Citigroup was shrinking its footprint, focusing on a handful of big cities to right itself after its near-collapse,” according to the Wall Street Journal.
Now the bank's executives are convinced that many U.S. consumers are finally ready to leave the branch behind and fully embrace digital banking.
Citigroup added roughly $1 billion in digital deposits in the first quarter, more than all of last year. About two-thirds of that total came from new customers, and a little more than half don't live near any of the bank's roughly 700 branches, the Journal noted.