There has been a lot of change in Miami over the past few years. With new companies being founded or moving to the city every day, an influx of capital being injected into startups, and neighborhoods like Wynwood becoming tech meccas seemingly overnight, Miami looks a whole lot different than it did just five years ago. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
One thing that remains unchanged is the city\u2019s diverse Latin American culture. According to recent demographics reports, 70% of Miami’s population is Hispanic. That diverse population has lived and thrived in the city for decades, producing its own powerhouse list of entrepreneurs and digital leaders. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Driss Temsamani is one of those people. He has lived in Miami for over 35 years, with 26 spent in digital-focused roles with banking giant CitiGroup. During that tenure, he has held positions in a few different Central and South American countries, but Miami has always remained home. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWhen I used to work for tech companies in the 90s, tech was tech<\/em>,\u201d says Temsamnani, recalling the evolution of his industry. \u201cNow, tech is business. Tech is everything. I\u2019ve really been able to see these new business models emerge\u2014ones that are highly valued and diverse.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n In his current role as Head of Digital for Citigroup Treasury & Trade Solutions (TTS) Latin America, Temsamani oversees a large tech team based in Miami that serves all of Citi\u2019s 20+ LatAm markets, including Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico. According to Citi, three years ago, 60% of its Latin American clients were considered digital\u2014today, that number is 75%, and it’s not a stretch to say that Temsamani and his team are responsible for a lot of that surge. The digital platforms his team develops impact millions of users on a daily basis, and the evolution of his role has largely followed the evolution of digital platforms as a whole. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Temsamani moved from Citi\u2019s analytics team in the early 2010s to focus on business innovation, finally settling into a “digital” role in 2017. However, his history of working on the ‘e-business’ side of things (it\u2019s what big corporations called digital platforms a decade and a half ago) spans Temsamani\u2019s entire career at Citi. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI came to Citi in 1994 with the goal to roll out a distributed computing credit application that was running on Lotus Notes [a mid-90s IBM software product],\u201d explains Temsamani. \u201cI spent a lot of my time thinking about the architecture and the technology and how it was going to electronically transform our organization.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt’s no longer solely about hard technology skills. We look for people that understand technology, but even more, understand the power of experiences.\u201d<\/p>Driss Temsamani, Head of Digital for Citigroup TTS Latin America<\/cite><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n Even in its current form, many businesses don\u2019t understand what \u201cdigital transformation\u201d actually means. Temsamani, however, was bringing this thinking to his company way back in 1994\u2014just replace \u201cdigital\u201d with \u201celectronic.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Eventually, Temsamani relocated to Buenos Aires to become Citi\u2019s CIO of e-business. It was here, right around the first wave of internet popularity<\/span>, that Temsamani understood the power digital platforms could have for the bank and its clients. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIn 2001, we realized the idea is that we should<\/em> use the internet to transform our business operating model and transform the way we do business.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Those two experiences mark the \u201celectronification” and \u201cinternet\u201d era of Temsamani\u2019s career thus far. Fast forward to now, and he clearly understands that the digital transformation era has been firmly established. But according to Temsamani, there was one resource that he and Citi never really thought about in the early days that has become digital transformation’s defining characteristic. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt’s all about data,\u201d he says. \u201cData not only plays a big role in the value proposition of a bank, but data also becomes money, and interactions, and new products. Data is everything we do with our clients on a daily basis.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n With this digital-first approach to banking that has really come to a head during the pandemic, Temsamani and his teams have really stepped back to understand the power of data and its impact on creating engaging experiences for consumers and clients. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Last month, Citi TTS unveiled a new Digital Account experience for its Latin American institutional users. Developed by Temsamani’s team in Miami, the new account utilizes the bank\u2019s technologies such as digital onboarding, e-signatures, and online product activations to bring every part of that institutional experience online. The new account removes the need for checkbooks and manual transactions while also adding new digital self-service capabilities and enhanced biometrics authentication.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cOne of the profound impacts digitization is having is that it’s collapsing individual industries into ecosystems,\u201d says Temsamani. \u201cSo for us, it means connecting these vertical industries in a seamless way. We want to be an invisible bank\u2014we want to be there, in that digital experience, integrating multiple things together so that the end-user doesn’t have to exit out. That\u2019s our winning formula.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n “We share ideas, talk about digital, and just that by itself is making the city very vibrant in this technology scene right now.\u201d<\/p>Driss Temsamani<\/cite><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n This focus on seamless UX has also resulted in Temsamani recruiting his digital teams in Miami and LatAm a bit differently. There is no longer solely a focus on those \u201chard\u201d technology skills. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cNow we look for people that understand technology, but even more, understand the power of experiences,\u201d he says. \u201cSo it’s very different to build solely around the branch, versus building that same experience in the digital world. It can be hard to think about becoming invisible in an experience of commerce or logistics. But we have to become more and more invisible.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Citi TTS\u2019 new Digital Account is just one example of many recent digital transformation projects Tamsamani has overseen. As new capital and ambitious founders flood into Miami, it\u2019s important to remember the city had a rich history of digital development before Mayor Suarez\u2019s tweet. For decades, Temsamani and the Citi LatAm team have been scaling digital finance solutions for the countries and cultural backgrounds that make up most of the city\u2019s population. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Still though, with his role and title at Citi evolving and shifting quickly over the last two decades, there is certainly a parallel to be drawn. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe city has changed, right? It has diversified a lot,\u201d Temsamani says. \u201cMiami used to be a \u2018six months of the year\u2019 city. Now it\u2019s 12, and we have this deep digital community you can really interact with. It started with conferences coming here and has really accelerated over the last six or so years. A lot of the people I meet at conferences and in technology now are from Miami, not just visiting.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n “We share ideas, talk about digital, and just that, by itself, is making the city very vibrant in this technology scene right now.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There has been a lot of change in Miami over the past few years. With new companies being founded or moving to the city every day, an influx of capital being injected into startups, and neighborhoods like Wynwood becoming tech meccas seemingly overnight, Miami looks a whole lot different than it did just five years […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":76244,"featured_media":125473,"menu_order":0,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"magazine-region":[],"magazine-series":[2191],"magazine-topic":[3674,3675],"class_list":["post-125159","magazine","type-magazine","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","magazine-series-transformers","magazine-topic-data","magazine-topic-leadership"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brainstation.io\/wp\/api\/wp\/v2\/magazine\/125159","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brainstation.io\/wp\/api\/wp\/v2\/magazine"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brainstation.io\/wp\/api\/wp\/v2\/types\/magazine"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brainstation.io\/wp\/api\/wp\/v2\/users\/76244"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/brainstation.io\/wp\/api\/wp\/v2\/magazine\/125159\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":134794,"href":"https:\/\/brainstation.io\/wp\/api\/wp\/v2\/magazine\/125159\/revisions\/134794"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brainstation.io\/wp\/api\/wp\/v2\/media\/125473"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brainstation.io\/wp\/api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=125159"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brainstation.io\/wp\/api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=125159"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brainstation.io\/wp\/api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=125159"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-region","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brainstation.io\/wp\/api\/wp\/v2\/magazine-region?post=125159"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brainstation.io\/wp\/api\/wp\/v2\/magazine-series?post=125159"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brainstation.io\/wp\/api\/wp\/v2\/magazine-topic?post=125159"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Miami’s digital banking evolution<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Building engaging digital experiences<\/h2>\n\n\n\n