Citi Ventures announced on Monday it welcomed 60 university students from Hong Kong to its San Francisco office in September as part of its week-long fintech-focused entrepreneurship bootcamp at Stanford Graduate School of Business under the Cyberport University Partnership Program (CUPP).
The students reportedly visited Citi Ventures on September 22 and were received by Valla Vakili, Head of Ventures Studio and Suman Natarajan, Vice President of Venture Investing. The duo shared details about how Citi Ventures partners with Citi’s businesses to explore new solutions and capabilities for the bank and its customers. They then addressed the U.S. FinTech landscape and how the Venture Investing team partners with entrepreneurs to make strategic investments in start-ups that are developing solutions across Data Analytics & Machine Learning, Commerce & Payments, Financial Technology, Marketing & Customer Experience and Security & Enterprise IT. Angel Ng, Consumer Business Manager of Citibank Hong Kong stated:
“At Citi, we play a pivotal role in fostering the development of FinTech in Hong Kong, to build a digital ecosystem. We will continue to actively collaborate with different key stakeholders and close partners like Cyberport, to cultivate the next generation of FinTech talents in Hong Kong. We believe the participants from this program have already gained global insights and a unique understanding on how Citi’s innovation works and our corporate culture, broadening their horizon to get a closer look of what the world’s leading digital bank can offer.”
Vakili then commented:
“We were pleased to welcome the students from the Cyberport University Partnership Programme to Citi Ventures. Engaging with diverse and emerging talent is an important part of our innovation model because it enables us to bring different perspectives to the table to uncover new solutions for our customers.”
Citi Ventures added another group of students from the Chinese University of Hong Kong will visit the award-winning Citi Innovation Lab in Singapore, which focuses on exploring new ideas and service concepts for transaction banking for institutions.