Head of Cross Border Payments
Citi
Emanuela is the Global Head of Cross Border Payments at Citi within Services. She is responsible for the management of a very broad and competitively differentiated suite of cross-border payments solutions in over 200 countries. She is accountable for business strategy and execution, P&L, product development and partnership with Markets. Recent innovation includes real-time payments into bank accounts and into Alternative Payment Methods across borders and currencies and Global Beneficiary Services which allow clients’ payees to digitally track incoming payments.
She has been with Citi for several years and has held various roles in product management in payments as well as a role in Strategy and Financial Planning & Analysis in New York. Before joining Citi in 2003, Emanuela worked for five years at Goldman Sachs in New York in both M&A and Equity Research.
Emanuela holds a master’s degree in economics from New York University (USA) and a degree magna cum laude in Economics and Commerce from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (Italy).
She served as a Non-Executive Director of Health Beacon plc prior to the company’s IPO; she sits on the EMEA Advisory Board of Women in Payments. In her personal life she is very enthusiastic about sport and a passionate Yoga practitioner. Emanuela is originally from Venice, Italy and currently lives in Dublin, Ireland with her husband Jim, a Boston native. They have two sons, aged 22 and 17.
Real-time payments are expected to generate $173 billion in additional economic output this year, according to the Center for Economic and Business Research. Cross-border payments are entering their “real-time era”—and in 2026 the biggest opportunity for banks is to evolve from slow, fee-driven intermediaries into 24/7 liquidity, settlement, and compliance hubs. This panel explores how banks can capture new revenue and deepen client relationships by delivering instant cross-border settlement, richer data, and embedded treasury capabilities—while maintaining trust, control, and regulatory-grade risk management.
The panelists will debate where banks can lead versus where they will be disintermediated, and which technologies will determine who wins the next generation of global payments. Key to this: Interoperability infrastructure—the combination of ISO 20022 + APIs + real-time compliance automation, increasingly paired with tokenized settlement rails, including stablecoins and blockchain-based networks. The discussion will include: