Citi's Rugg at Consensus: tokenized finance needs shared rails, not walled gardens.

Citigroup's Ryan Rugg, head of digital assets for treasury and trade solutions, told the Consensus audience in Miami that tokenized money will fall short of its potential if it stays locked inside single-bank networks. His clients — large corporates managing hundreds or thousands of accounts across multiple institutions globally — are not asking for a Citi-only token. They want multi-bank, real-time, always-on payments that cross institutional boundaries without friction.

Citi has built its own tokenized platform and connected it to a 24/7 U.S. dollar clearing network spanning more than 300 banks, but Rugg was clear that internal upgrades are not sufficient. The industry's growing patchwork of incompatible tokenized deposit systems risks recreating the very inefficiencies blockchain is supposed to eliminate. Shared infrastructure built at the industry level — he pointed to Swift's…