As the Global Head, Treasury & Trade Solutions at Citi, Naveed Sultan, drives customer acquisition and oversees technology. In an interview with Saikat Das, Sultan talks about risk management practices and how technology could be harnessed to drive sustainable competitive advantage. Edited excerpts:Are there systemic checks that can stop PNB-like banking frauds?I don’t know the details about it. However, one of the most important things for banks is to build controls and check points, systemically or specifically, for specific transactions or flows. These controls have to be downstream, upstream and at the core of this is technology. There is a tremendous amount of focus we put on these things. It is imperative that control measures and our security or risk management also evolve appropriately… One of the technologies currently in production was built by our innovation center in Dublin. The Payment Outlier Detector has a self-learning element that studies the client’s flows, and several other features. Basis the analysis, it creates a type of payment fingerprint for the client. As data are fed into the machine, it goes through self-learning. If there is a transaction, the system believes does not make a fit with that payment fingerprint, there is a feedback loop going back to the client for confirmation. This is one kind of technology for risk management on flows.Do these investments cost a lot?I think the investment is basically in technology and processes. However, this investment helps differentiate oneself, because risk management is a key differentiator. If you have better risk management and make the right level of investments, you can execute your business objectives with greater confidence. Your clients also have greater confidence and, therefore, it creates an upside for your business. We would be better off on the business side.Technology is bigger in banking than banking itself. How do you see it?It’s a big opportunity for banks like Citi. What really is technology? There are two ways of looking at it. One is the technology start-ups, the Fintechs and all the rest of it. If you look at industry statistics, a majority of investments are going into wealth management, asset management and the consumer side of it. On the institutional side, the approach is for fintech to be more collaborative with banks because our relationships have multiple points as opposed to a single point. Fintech has, therefore, realized that it is much better to work with banks such as ourselves and find ways where we can use their capabilities to deliver solutions to our clients. That helps them become successful and it helps us deliver better value to our client.What is your view on crypto currencies?Digital currencies, as you have started seeing, are not consistent or aligned with the public policy in terms of achieving the overall objectives of a monetary policy and so on and so forth. They are not safe, not pervasive and things of those nature. I would talk about the underlying technology, block chain as an important technology. This can actually lead to significant innovation down the line, be it led by the governments or other economic actors in a system. I think they are basically for speculative purposes. They don’t really serve any economic or business purpose at this stage.