Citi is the latest company outside Madison Avenue to launch an advertising business.
The bank exclusively told CMO Insider that it’s creating a new unit called Citi Commerce Media, which will let brands advertise to its more than 70 million customers based on their spending.
Citi will target ads to people on its own app and website, as well as on other properties, based on their spending histories. So a customer scrolling on Facebook could see a 10% off ad from a travel company, for instance.
Part of Citi’s pitch is that it can link its ads to measurable business impacts. It said it ran a pilot ad with retail, payments, technology, and health and beauty brands. Two campaigns produced an average 15% lift in spending compared to people who weren’t shown ads.
Citi said its platform would be informed by intel from 6.5 billion annual transactions across more than 700 spending categories.
“We are focusing primarily based on your spending pattern, and that’s what the advertisers care the most about,” said Abhinav Anand, head of value cards, lending, and commerce at Citi.
A growing number of non-advertising companies have leveraged their customers’ data to build ad businesses. Citi is an example of the fast-growing field of financial media networks, in which firms use first-party customer data to enable advertisers to target audiences across the digital ecosystem.
As financial institutions, they have a fuller picture of their customers’ spending than typical retail media networks, where retailers — often grocers or big-box stores like Walmart — run ads based on data about how people browse and spend within their ecosystems.
Anand said he sees an opportunity to take spending share from retail media networks that have more limited data.
EMARKETER, a Business Insider sister company, forecast that financial media networks would pass $1 billion in US ad spend by 2026 and grow at a compound annual growth rate of over 66% through 2027.
Other financial institutions have already built such networks. JPMorgan Chase and PayPal launched ads businesses in 2024. Mastercard and American Express followed with similar moves in the fall of 2025.
For traditional banks, these networks offer a new source of revenue as fintechs and buy-now, pay-later companies like Klarna and Affirm encroach on their turf.
Citi is entering a competitive market
Anand acknowledged that Citi is entering a competitive market.
He said he isn’t too concerned about not being a first-mover, though, given Citi has one of the biggest credit card customer bases. He added that earlier entrants had demonstrated the demand.
Citi expects to get a boost from Kard, a commerce, media, and rewards platform it recently agreed to buy. With Kard, Citi hopes to have a built-in market of merchants to sell ads to. Anand also said Citi is betting on a feature that allows advertisers to target customers at different points in the purchase cycle.
Kasha Cacy, chief media officer at the agency Known, said Citi’s late entry into the market isn’t necessarily a drawback if it has a robust sales effort out of the gate.
“Citi certainly should have a lot of purchase behavior — maybe not to Amazon’s scale but not insignificant — and if you can target off that, it could become very interesting, especially as an alternative to Amazon,” she said.
There are risks to this endeavor. Given the level of information financial companies have about their customers, entering advertising requires them to be transparent with customers about how they use their data. Citi customers must opt out if they don’t want to see these ads.
Anand said Citi built its platform with data privacy and trust at the forefront, featuring ads that are personalized and not out of context.
“We have built our business on years of history of Citi being a very trusted financial advisor,” he said. “And we continue to bring those principles forth. Also, the ads and offers we are going to present to you in the Citi ecosystem would be highly personalized to you and not just willy-nilly showing up.”
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