Citi’s trajectory over the past 15 years has epitomised the much wider changes in the global banking industry.
Until the sub-prime crisis, the group had consumer franchises spread across 50 countries and businesses ranging from insurance to hedge funds and private equity. But banks that tried to be everything to everyone, everywhere, were a much harder sell after 2008. The crisis ushered in a new era, in which new capital and liquidity requirements at country level made operating across multiple geographies in retail banking much more complicated and expensive.
Although Citi today remains America’s most international bank, it has been through what is perhaps the industry’s biggest restructuring ever: recently refocusing on cross-border institutional needs, international wealth management and US personal banking. The responsibility on Citi’s chief executive to complete that restructuring has probably been the hardest job in banking.
Euromoney names Jane Fraser its banker of the year for her decisive action to reshape Citi into a simpler and more coherent bank, bringing the firm new business momentum over the past year.
“It’s been a deliberate journey,” Fraser tells Euromoney about her drive to change Citi. “I knew it was going to be multiple years and I knew I had to get a move on: to be bold around it and take tough decisions that hadn’t been made before, and to make investments that were going to be hard for the bottom line for a couple of years but would then bear fruit.”
Leaders are made, not born, in Fraser’s opinion. She sees that in her own trajectory at Citi, where she has worked in a variety of businesses around the world: from the corporate and investment bank to the private bank and US consumer bank, to leading its business across Latin America, after joining from McKinsey 20 years ago. The insights gathered helped her see what Citi was best suited to own and what it needed to do to work better as a whole.
“Having experience of different parts of the bank gives you a lot of courage and conviction, to get clarity quickly about what needs to be done and stick to the plan, even if it’s difficult,” she says.
Despite her knowledge of the firm, Fraser still took time to speak to clients, investors, regulators and staff in different parts of the bank during the transition period before she officially took over as chief executive. “Our folk here are not shy about telling you what you need to do when you ask them,” she says.
Calling tough decisions
Fraser formally took on the CEO role in 2021, becoming the first woman to run a large US bank.
When the investor day came around in 2022 and she laid out her medium and long-term strategy, she already had a firm idea of how to remodel the organisational structure –and consequently its culture.
By 2021, the bank had already exited its pre-2008 sub-prime mortgage exposures, among other legacy assets, focusing more on its core business. It had also exited many of its smaller retail banks around the world, although the largest remained, notably India, Korea, Taiwan and, biggest of all, Mexico.
We are not done and we’ve still got a way to go. There is no victory being declared, but there is very clear, demonstrable progress
Jane Fraser
There was a sense that Citi had deferred key decisions about its structure and ownership of certain businesses, notably in retail banking. The resulting organisational complexity and years of underinvestment in its back-office systems and technology were taking their toll: epitomised by a $900 million mistaken transfer to creditors of client Revlon in 2020. US banking authorities levied a $400 million fine on the bank later that year, putting it on multi-year remediation plan to address risk and control deficiencies.
The bank was sorely lagging key US peers, most obviously JPMorgan Chase but also Bank of America, whose share price appreciation for the decade until early 2024 was more than three times Citi’s.
Enacting bigger changes has not always made Fraser popular. Her 2022 announcement of a separation from Banamex was momentous but Fraser had announced 13 other retail exits only a month after she became chief executive. This included India – which it sold to Axis Bank in 2023 – a country where it has operated for over 100 years and pioneered card technology in the 1980s and 1990s.
“I haven’t asked easy things of our people,” Fraser acknowledges, showing her trademark empathy. “There was a lot of pride in some of these retail businesses and it has been hard to let go of them from a cultural point of view.”
Euromoney’s 2023 article on Fraser’s mighty task
Project Bora Bora
Bigger than any individual country sale decision was Project Bora Bora – the internal name for Citi’s biggest management reorganisation in two decades, launched in late 2023.
As part of that project, the completion of consumer exits from southeast Asia, India and Taiwan in 2023 allowed the dismantling of multiple regional structures designed for when it was a global universal bank. Fraser remodelled the bank’s management structure along five core capabilities that she had previously set out in the 2022 investor day: banking, markets, services (including transaction banking and securities services), global wealth management and US personal banking.
Project Bora Bora started by getting rid of two layers that previously sat between her and the businesses: personal banking and wealth management, and the institutional clients group, whose former head Paco Ybarra had announced his departure shortly before. Leaders of the five new core businesses now report directly to her.
One of Jane’s real strengths is that she has an extraordinary ability to attract talent to the firm
John Dugan, Citi
What followed went much deeper. Before the reorganisation, Citi had as many as 13 management layers. It now has eight, removing scores of committees and vast amounts of reporting. It also took an axe to co-heads and dual reporting lines. Around 50,000 staff are now working under a different manager.
Fresh blood came in – such as Andy Sieg, Citi’s head of wealth since September 2023, former president of president of Bank of America’s Merrill Wealth Management arm – people who Fraser thought would thrive with a challenge. But the reorganisation has also led to the cut more than 5,000 roles, mainly in management.
“We’ve taken some pretty tough talent calls,” says Fraser. “If someone was a strong performer, but their job had gone away in the reorg, we would put them into a job that someone else had.”
As the bank and industry at large has taken stock of the scale of this management restructuring, this past year has been a pivotal one for Citi – and not just due to the completion of the job moves in early 2024.
Proof in the pudding
Financial results appear to have inflected. Net profit rose by 37% to $12.7 billion, after a decline in 2023. Total revenues reached $81 billion for the year, the highest since 2010. Operating leverage was positive for the firm overall, and for each of the five businesses, continuing in the first quarter of 2025.
The stock market has taken note. The promise of higher share buybacks, coupled with better-than-expected earnings, helped make Citi one of the best performing stocks among US and global banks in late 2024 and early 2025. More equity analysts have also altered their perspectives – and not just Mike Mayo, the Wells Fargo analyst who was previously the leading critic of Citi’s global consumer franchise. Mayo now believes that Citi’s stock should trade above book value, as its cost-to-income ratio falls below 60% in the next two years versus 72% in 2023.
John Dugan
“We’ve made substantial progress, particularly in the last year, on the shoulders of what had been done on a planning basis over the prior couple of years. We’re seeing proof points of that now, including in the internal control side,” John Dugan, Citi’s chair tells Euromoney.
At the business level, investment banking already shows signs that the strategy is working. Banking revenue was up 32% in 2024, and there were further rises in the first quarter of 2025, largely thanks to M&A. Dealogic data also shows the bank making clear gains in investment banking market share over the past year, globally and in the US.
New hires in areas such as healthcare reinvigorated existing talent, and better group interconnectedness is helping to fill a hole in the advisory market, says Fraser. “We are using the strength of our global platform, and what we do in Services and other areas, to propel the relationship into the boardroom.”
In late 2023, Fraser deliberately went public in saying that she was looking primarily outside the bank for someone to lead the new banking division. Some questioned the wisdom of that and whether the bank could attract a sufficiently high-profile hire. But in February 2024, she announced Vis Raghavan as the new hire, previously head of global investment banking at JPMorgan.
Tim Ryan
A new $25 billion direct lending tie-up with Apollo Global Management and an expanded partnership with American Airlines also came in late 2024.
Dugan also points to the hiring of Tim Ryan, head of technology and business enablement, and previously PwC’s US chair and senior partner. “One of Jane’s real strengths is that she has an extraordinary ability to attract talent to the firm,” he says.
In late 2024, in another sign of progress, Citi completed the separation of the Mexican consumer, business and commercial banking business from its institutional business in the country – an essential step in paving the way for an IPO and eventually a full deconsolidation from Banamex.
More than a sum of the parts
Exiting from international consumer business like Mexico has made possible a fundamental reconfiguration of Citi’s business and technology platforms, in line with a more globally consistent approach. One less defined by country-level banks and instead revolving around five more coherent and better-connected businesses.
The Services unit, for example, is a new creation, elevating businesses previously somewhat buried in the hierarchy. The banking division combines the investment, corporate and commercial banks. The wealth division has also brought together businesses from various parts of the bank. And it has exited important but peripheral activities such as municipal bonds and a wealth joint venture with Edward Jones.
The associated task of modernising its technology in line with the new strategy and organisational structure has seen it move from 12 sanctions platforms to one, 20 cash equity platforms to one, and six new-product approval platforms to one. “That’s expensive and thankless work until it’s done, and then it’s joyful,” Fraser says, although she is quick to acknowledge the thankless part has fallen primarily on her colleagues.
In mid-2025, Citi still faces challenges. The 2024 results saw a sharp lift in return on tangible common equity but not yet at the double-digit medium-term target Fraser set out in 2022.
“We are not done and we’ve still got a way to go,” Fraser emphasises. “There is no victory being declared, but there is very clear, demonstrable progress.”
Banamex, despite the formal separation, is one of the bigger outstanding items. It will be ready to IPO later this year, although the timing is dependent on regulatory approvals and market conditions. Full regulatory deconsolidation is further off.
Tech to-do list
The number one priority, however, remains the transformation of its back-office systems, not least as catching up on tech investment heavily increases costs in the short term, particularly during the migration period when old and new platforms need to run simultaneously.
Fraser dismisses concerns around a mistaken payment of $81 trillion that it almost made in early 2024, as the bank stopped the transfer. Nevertheless, US banking authorities again pushed Citi to beef up its internal control last year, imposing a combined $136 million fine around data governance issues.
She makes clear that investing in modern preventative platforms has been vital in making sure the firm is safe from human errors.
“If you move from 20 different ways of doing something to one, that reduces the risk of something going wrong enormously. Then you make sure that the process around that makes sense, end to end: making sure it isn’t convoluted and complex. You put in all your controls, both preventive, and detective. You try and make as many of them automated as possible, and then you test them constantly to make sure they’re working. That is the deeply unsexy but very important work we have been doing.”
The bank retired or replaced 130 technology applications in the first quarter of 2025 alone.
Fraser compares completing the technology overhaul to going through a construction project’s final punch list. “There are a lot more things coming off the to-do list than getting added to it. We can see it delivering better outcomes and starting to improve efficiency. There’s been a huge lift done, but now we’re in the phase when you’re starting to get things closed.”
Titi Cole
With momentum behind the transformation, “the new Citi” she conceived three years ago is already in her grasp – with the overarching plan even slightly ahead of schedule, firstly thanks to a quick advance on the retail exits in a process mostly led by Titi Cole.
Citi agreed the last of its 13 promised retail exits in May, selling its Polish consumer business to local firm Velobank, after previously postponing it due to the Ukraine war.
If Citi has moved forward decisively, much of it is simply thanks to having stuck with the programme. In India, for example, retail banking was a third of the business, but revenues in the country are now higher than before the Axis sale. “That’s the value of focus and the execution of the team for the remaining businesses,” she says. “They didn’t run the bank as they did before but used the investment that was freed up, and linkages between the businesses became much easier.”
It is now getting to the stage where the bank could contemplate doing M&A to bolster its scale in wealth management. And perhaps most important of all is the sense that Fraser is winning hearts and minds inside Citi, as more people see that the reorganisation was the right thing to do.
Fraser’s ultimate vision, meanwhile, is that the only way Citi can reach its potential is when its businesses work together, with wealth getting business from US retail, investment banking from wealth and so on.
“Our business leaders have high ambition, but they don’t have raging egos, so we don’t have the clash of the titans going on,” she says. “Instead, you’ve got the collaboration we need to drive the businesses forward. That cascades down the organisation.”
One of her greatest moments of satisfaction, therefore, was seeing Raghavan and the head of markets, Andrew Morton, playing as table tennis partners at a recent management offsite.
“We are a different Citi today – on the way to being that new Citi that I had in mind.”
Wealth management: Citi’s new era in action
Wealth management is one of the microcosms of how Jane Fraser has led change at Citi in recent years. Previously, the potential was there in terms of its brand, clients and people. But it had to deal with an extraordinary degree of institutional complexity: breeding inefficiency and a range of distractions peripheral to its core client business.
More than a decade after the crisis-era sale of US retail broker Smith Barney to Morgan Stanley, Fraser made clear in her 2022 investor day that wealth management – both in the US and globally – was core to her strategy. That commitment and a wider sense of change at Citi helped attract Andy Sieg, former president of Merrill Lynch Wealth Management, to lead the business in 2023.
Andy Sieg
“Citi is uniquely an American bank with global DNA,” Sieg says. “There’s no other bank which can address that opportunity. Even those who are as global as we are don’t have the position that we have in the investment bank, in markets, or in the services business. We want to lean into those strengths outside the US, and we want to make up for lost time in terms of accelerating growth in the world’s largest wealth market here in North America.”
He adds: “Down the road, Jane believes, and I believe, this can be the world’s number one wealth management business.”
Around the time of Sieg’s arrival, one of the core elements of Fraser’s 2023 restructuring was bringing wealth management under one roof – pooling elements previously spread between the consumer bank, the institutional business and other divisions.
Sieg could subsequently take a proper look at how to refocus towards investments and make sure it was pricing its deposit and loan products correctly. Banks typically like wealth management because they see it as capital lite. Citi, however, was earning the bulk of its wealth revenues from net interest income.
“The business had been more focused on deposit taking and lending than most wealth businesses are around the world. We needed to ensure we had the growth engine running with the right focus on investments. There has been a good deal of getting fit regarding how the balance sheet was being used in wealth, and we continue to drive net new investment assets into the firm.”
Sieg also says it has been easier to work with the other businesses since the group has restructured among simpler and more global lines.
The wealth business has already come a long way in a short time. Two years ago revenues were falling and costs were rising. Return on tangible common equity in late 2023 was just 0.6% in wealth management. In 2024, however, wealth revenues rose by 7% and then by 24% in the first quarter of 2025, as net new investment assets accelerated, showing especially strong growth in Citi Gold, its premier banking business in the US.
“There were a lot of sceptics about Citi’s right to play in wealth,” Fraser notes. “Last year was a lot about answering why we had the right to win. This year it’s about how much faster can we go.”