Through 2019, we have seen several reports from leading financial firm JP Morgan with regards to JPMCoin, the new JP Morgan backed cryptocurrency.

Whilst this seems like an exciting development, JP Morgan are actually way behind their rivals Citibank, who actually announced plans to explore their own cryptocurrency back in 2015. Since the announcement from JP Morgan however, it seems Citibank have abandoned their plans to reach into crypto, for now at least.

The project announced in 2015 was known as Citicoin, this was an idea to use blockchain technology to improve global payment processes, though it seems that since 2015, the project had never materialised into anything significant. According to Coindesk, Gulru Atak, the Global Head of Innovation for Treasury and Trade Solutions at Citibank has commented on some of the experiments that have been carried out within Citicoin in the past:

“Based on our learnings from that experiment we actually decided to make meaningful improvements in the existing rails by leveraging the payments ecosystem and within that ecosystem, we are considering the fintechs as well or the regulators around the world as well, including SWIFT.”

So, instead of designing and implementing their own blockchain based technology, Citibank have found it to be more efficient to work on improving current services by working alongside the likes of SWIFT, in order to improve the technologies that already exist. Simply put, Citibank didn’t see any reason to design new concepts, when instead they can focus their efforts on utilising current technology.

Furthermore, Atak has added:

“If we are talking about cross border payments, how many banks do we have across the world – and how many of them are already on-boarded on SWIFT? And how long has it taken SWIFT to onboard all those banks?”

Citibank believe that it could take too long for anyone to actually want to adopt their technology, given that it’s taken SWIFT so long to see institutional adoption too.

We can’t forget Citiconnect either - a project that has been designed to leverage current legacy systems, though sadly this won’t be used to issue any stablecoins in the future either: