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EDWARD HOROWITZExecutive Vice-President, CitibankHanging on a wall in the office of Citicorp tech whiz Edward D. Horowitz are framed drawings of the cartoon characters Beavis and Butt-head that Horowitz, 49, brought along when he left Viacom Inc. for Citi in January. Gesturing toward the drawings, he explains that his job as Citi's global technology chief is not that much different from the role he played as senior vice-president for technology at the entertainment giant. ''It's all about content,'' he says. ''And distribution.'' Today, of course, banks are vying to be among the first to ''distribute'' bank services over the Internet. In November, Citibank, which led the charge into consumer banking technology in the 1970s by introducing automated teller machines on a large scale, will enable its retail customers to access their accounts and execute transactions on the World Wide Web for the first time. Although Citi isn't the first to convert its home-banking operations from an online system to the Internet, Horowitz says Citi's edge lies in its ability to accomplish this eventually in the 98 countries where it does business. ''If something's working in Poland,'' he says, ''we can bring it to Brooklyn.'' Horowitz is also working with Citibank's wholesale operations to bring Internet banking to corporate clients. In 1998, he says, ''our agenda is to put that information on their desktop without their having to talk to a human being.'' Besides content and distribution, Horowitz cites another parallel between the banking and entertainment businesses. In television, he says, ''there's a new season every September.'' Likewise, in electronic commerce, ''you've always got to be prepared to remake yourself.''
By Phillip L. Zweig in New York
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Updated Oct. 16, 1997 by bwwebmaster
Copyright 1997, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
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