Citigroup backs fintech company Genesis

[LONDON] Citigroup has made a strategic investment in Genesis Global Technology, a London-based startup that develops technology to make it cheaper and faster for financial firms to build applications such as trading systems, the companies said on Monday.

The companies did not disclose the amount and terms of the investment.

Genesis has developed a so-called "low-code application platform", or tools to enable banks and other financial institutions to build new software for various business lines with fewer amount of coding.

Genesis' technology can make it on average 80 per cent faster than building an application from scratch, said the company's chief executive Stephen Murphy.

"It gives you every building block you'll need to cover any use case that you would want to implement in the financial markets," Mr Murphy said in an interview.

The investment comes as banks continue to partner young technology companies that they hope can make their IT operations more efficient and less costly. The need to automate more processes faster and keep costs in check has grown during the Covid-19 pandemic, as more bank business is now carried out remotely.

Citi backed Genesis through its Markets FinTech Investments and Sprint groups, the company said.

"The low code development as a paradigm is catching on quite quickly, it has the potential to change the way the financial industry builds applications in the future," Nikhil Joshi, global head of spread products technology and head of markets technology for North America said.

Citi tested Genesis technology to build a proof of concept for a structured credit trading system, he said.

REUTERS