Citi's digital engagement is surging — but its in-person interactions seem to be getting less popular (C)

Citigroup's Q2 2019 earnings revealed that the bank cut company-wide operating expenses by 2% to $10.5 billion, according to CNBC. Citi also saw a solid bump in overall digital banking users up 11.3% year-over-year (YoY) from 27.4 million to 30.5 million and its mobile customers grew twice as fast (+22.4% YoY), up from 16.5 million to 20.2 million.

Citibank's Digital Channels Grow As Physical Recedes Business Insider Intelligence

As Citi's digital engagement surges, its in-person interactions seem to be getting less popular.The bank's agent contact rate or the total number of agent-handled calls divided by average total active accounts slipped approximately 6.1% in the last 12 months, suggesting customers need bank employees to resolve customer service inquiries less regularly.

Further, Citi's total number of branches dipped 1% YoY in Q2. The contraction in these metrics, combined with stronger digital engagement numbers, signals customers are turning to digital tools to interface with the bank more, in turn lowering their reliance on traditional human interaction.

This may be part of the reason Citi shrank its operating expenses in Q2: Customer interactions with a teller or call agent incur a variable cost of $4 for a bank, while mobile interactions only cost around 10 cents, per Bain & Company. In a similar vein, another way Citi has seen a digital process replace a costlier legacy one is in its growing percentage of electronic client statements, which hit 50% in the last 12 months, up 3 percentage points from 2018.

Citi should be careful not to take its digital-first cost-cutting strategy too far, given the prominent role live employees and branches play in driving sales.Some banks have abruptly shifted funds into their IT budgets and away from legacy channels. However, they must be careful not to get carried away and neglect those legacy channels such as branches as they're still very relevant for driving value from customers.

For example, households that frequently use branches have driven 70% of Chase's deposit growth between 2014 and 2018. Branches can also help with sales that may be more complex to handle, such as upselling customers to more lucrative services, like mortgages, as they can require more personal attention and face-to-face interaction to set up. So far, Citigroup seems to be keeping this solidly in mind: Its total branch count is down, but only slightly so, shrinking by less than 40 locations since Q1 2018.

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