By Lisa Kassenaar
July 21 (Bloomberg) -- Vikram Pandit walks through the white stone Mexico City headquarters of Grupo Financiero Banamex SA, past Diego Rivera's 1942 Calla Lily Vendor, and into a steep, narrow auditorium for a town hall meeting with Citigroup Inc. bankers.
It's Jan. 30, and Pandit is six weeks into running the biggest U.S. financial services company. He's just spent the day talking with Manuel Medina-Mora, chief executive officer of Banamex, which New York-based Citigroup bought in 2001. Pandit, 51, born in Nagpur, India, is on a world tour of Citi offices that's also taking him to South Korea and Poland.
Now, the Citi CEO is facing dozens of executives in rows of bright-red upholstered chairs. One stands up and asks the new boss if he'll change the bank's Latin American strategy, according to people who were there. ``It's up to him,'' says Pandit, pointing to Medina-Mora.
The Mexican executive offers Pandit, the novice CEO, something that's in short supply for Citi these days: a sliver of good news. Banamex profits doubled from 2002, the first full year the bank was part of Citi, through last year. Pandit says the Mexican bank is a model of what he wants Citi to become.
It's a one-stop bank, where some of Mexico's largest companies -- tequila maker Casa Cuervo SA is one -- do all their business, including currency hedges and stock and bond deals. Banamex also manages their owners' personal fortunes and handles their employee paychecks.
Profits in Latam
Medina-Mora, 58, points out that Latin America represented 6 percent of Citi's assets and 15 percent of its profits in the 12 months ended in June 2007. In the first half of this year, the Latin American division earned $1.85 billion.
Little else looks good at Citi these days. The company, founded as the City Bank of New York in 1812, is mired in a crisis that toppled Pandit's predecessor, Charles Prince, and has prompted $54.6 billion in writedowns and credit costs, according to Bloomberg data. That includes about $10 billion to increase reserves for future bad loans.
The bank racked up $17.4 billion in losses in the nine months ended on June 30 -- including $7.6 billion since Pandit took over in December. Citi has had to go hat-in-hand to Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Singapore for infusions of capital. Since mid- 2007, 16,000 Citi jobs have been eliminated.
The bank made some of the biggest bets in the subprime lending debacle -- and absorbed some of the biggest losses. It has had to bail out at least nine off-balance-sheet investment funds in the past year, including seven structured investment vehicles, or SIVs, holding $45 billion of securities. And defaults are rising. Consumer loans more than 90 days past due rose 62 percent to $14 billion during the year ended on June 30.
Behemoth
The behemoth that Pandit heads -- the biggest credit card company, the second-biggest wealth manager, the biggest corporate securities underwriter -- is likely to suffer well into 2009 as the global economy quavers. Its shares fell 62.5 percent in the 12 months ended on July 18.
William Smith, whose New York-based SAM Advisors LLC owns about 80,000 Citi shares, says the once-mighty conglomerate that Sanford ``Sandy'' Weill assembled over 20 years should be broken up and auctioned off. He plans to spend the next year organizing activist shareholders.
``The businesses are absolutely beautiful, but they've been suffocated,'' Smith says. Citi is bloated and mismanaged, he says. The company employed 375,000 people at the end of 2007, 48,000 more than 12 months earlier, due mostly to acquisitions. That means it took on the equivalent of the entire staff of Morgan Stanley in a year when credit markets seized up after June.
Cost Cutting
Whether Pandit can keep Citigroup intact depends on his ability to curb new losses and push up the stock price. Within the Citi bureaucracy, he has moved swiftly to redraw lines of authority, cut costs and eliminate redundancies in the bank's vast network of branches and offices.
``We are reorganizing this place,'' says Pandit, who worked at Morgan Stanley for 22 years before leaving to start a hedge fund that was bought by Citi in 2007. He holds four degrees from Columbia University in New York, including a Ph.D. in finance. ``When you go through the events that we've gone through, it crystallizes people's thinking,'' he says. ``They say, 'You know what? We are ready to do the right thing -- whatever it is -- and we are ready for a change.'''
As for the shares, the new CEO says misery loves company. ``We are in an industry transitioning from a very unusual time,'' Pandit says, sitting in his corner office at 399 Park Avenue in midtown Manhattan. ``And the fact is that Citi is no longer an outlier in terms of where the stock is.''
Stock Drop
The stock closed at $19.35 on July 18, down 34 percent for the year. That compares with a 42 percent drop in the Standard & Poor's 500 Financials Index. Rival JPMorgan Chase & Co., which also blends retail and investment banking, was down 8.3 percent this year as of July 18.
Some investors think Citigroup stock is a steal at current prices. Robert Olstein, chairman of Olstein Capital Management LP in Purchase, New York, has added more than 2 million shares to his portfolio since October. In mid-July, he bought the stock at $16.50, he says, putting his average purchase price at about $30.
``Citi is not disappearing,'' says Olstein. ``We're people who look out two to three years, not two to three days. We think the stock is at ridiculous prices.''
Still, Olstein says Pandit may write off billions more in bad loans in quarters to come. ``There are some land mines here, but I've made my bet,'' he says.
`Citi Has to Exist'
Likewise, Peter Sorrentino, senior portfolio manager at Huntington Asset Advisors in Cincinnati, says Citi's diverse sources of income mean the bank will forge on.
``Citi has to exist, or something like it will take its place,'' he says. ``But if this hysteria continues, you could see it as a single-digit stock before it comes back, sad to say.'' His firm, which manages $16.7 billion, owns 600,000 Citi shares.
Pandit has been working hard to keep the single digits at bay. Since December, he has raised more than $40 billion in capital -- including $6.9 billion from the Government of Singapore Investment Corp., $5.6 billion from the Kuwait Investment Authority and $4.9 billion via a new share issue. Buyers of a private January sale of preferred shares included Prince Alwaleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia, Citi's biggest shareholder, and Weill.
The sales bolstered Citigroup's Tier 1 capital ratio, a gauge of a bank's ability to absorb losses, to 8.8 percent -- up from 7.1 percent in the final quarter of 2007. Tier 1 capital on June 30 was 8.7 percent.
Cutting the Dividend
In January, Pandit cut the company's dividend by 41 percent to 32 cents a share, saving about $4.4 billion a year. Pandit has also promised to pare $500 billion from a balance sheet that ballooned by 45 percent, to $2.2 trillion, from 2005 to '07. The bank will jettison some of its less-lucrative loans, write down more nonperforming assets and put some subsidiaries on the market, he says.
On July 11, Citigroup agreed to sell its German consumer bank to Credit Mutuel Group of France for 4.9 billion euros ($7.7 billion). Citi is likely to cut tens of thousands more jobs before the end of 2009, according to a person familiar with the situation.
In addition, Pandit is revamping Citi's far-flung international banking empire, which encompasses 106 countries and accounted for more than half of its $81.7 billion revenue in 2007. Under Prince, Pandit says, Citi pushed financial products, largely designed in New York, through narrow channels to clients around the world. For example, each of Citi in Poland's five divisions -- consumer, corporate, commercial, investment banking and private banking -- reported separately back to New York.
Regional CEOs
In some locations, retail and corporate branches have been operating across the street from one another with little effort at coordination, says Shirish Apte, Citi's new head for Central and Eastern Europe.
Pandit in March changed Citi's product-based model to one relying on regional CEOs, who organize bank operations in their parts of the globe. In addition to Apte, who handled the company's acquisition of Warsaw-based Bank Handlowy in 2000, Medina-Mora will put his ideas in practice from Mexico to Brazil, Chile and Peru.
London-based William Mills is now in charge of Western Europe, the Middle East and Africa, which posted $11.4 billion in revenue last year, down 21 percent from 2006. Ajay Banga, who ran the international consumer business, has moved to Hong Kong to oversee the Asia-Pacific region, which brought in $18.8 billion in 2007, up 36 percent from a year earlier.
Morgan Stanley Vets
In New York, Pandit has hired a new crew, many of them veterans of Morgan Stanley and Old Lane Partners LP, the hedge fund he founded in 2006. John Havens, Pandit's closest colleague, is now in charge of investment banking and trading -- the unit that has suffered the brunt of the bank's losses. Havens, who turns 52 in September, says he and Pandit had adjoining offices for more than 15 years.
``He can finish my sentences, and I can finish his,'' Havens says.
Citigroup said today that vice chairman Michael Klein, an investment banker who has run units including trading and global banking since 2004, will leave to ``pursue other opportunities.'' Klein, 44, was named chairman of the institutional clients group and a company vice chairman when Havens was put in charge of the institutional clients group.
Redundant Networks
Terri Dial, 58, a former Wells Fargo & Co. executive, now oversees U.S. retail banking and consumer finance and will revamp the bank's global consumer strategy. Brian Leach, 49, a Morgan Stanley vet, is the new chief risk officer.
Don Callahan, 52, who once worked in marketing for International Business Machines Corp., is the chief administrative officer and has been charged with streamlining the bank's technology requirements.
Citigroup's worldwide computer networks are massively redundant, the result of the bank's failure to integrate scores of acquisitions, Callahan says.
The team is well aware of the stream of criticism from analysts and investors, they say.
Shutting Out the Noise
``There is noise on the outside, but we are not fixated on the opinion of the day,'' says Sallie Krawcheck, 43, Citi's head of global wealth management and one of the few upper-tier holdovers from the Prince regime. ``We go in to meetings, we put the books down; here we go. There isn't a lot of glittering Bonfire of the Vanities stuff going on around here'' -- a reference to the 1987 novel by Tom Wolfe that glamorizes, and satirizes, the lives of Wall Street bond traders.
Krawcheck's unit includes research, 14,600 Smith Barney financial advisers and Citi's private bank. The division had $1.6 trillion in assets under management as of March 31.
Pandit & Co. see a part of Citigroup's future in its past. In May, the CEO revived a variation of Citi's 1970s tag line ``The Citi Never Sleeps,'' which originally referred to the bank's then innovative network of New York automated teller machines. The revised slogan, ``Citi Never Sleeps,'' is now featured in the company's advertising campaigns worldwide.
Pandit is reading histories of the bank dating to the turn of the 20th century and watching videotapes of the late Walter Wriston, Citibank's CEO from 1967 to 1984.
History Lesson
In his office, he opens a black, clothbound book, one of 11 volumes lined up on the shelf behind his desk. It's National City Bank's 1912 annual report. Pandit pauses at the simple, one-page balance sheet.
``Look at that -- assets were already more than a billion dollars,'' he says. The books were sent to Pandit shortly after he got the job by John Reed, who succeeded Wriston as CEO. The two men have been talking, particularly about how Reed handled the banking crisis that coincided with the 1990-91 recession and real estate downturn.
Pandit's actions so far only scratch at what's needed to overhaul a bank buckling under its own weight, says SAM's Smith. Citi needs to cut at least 45,000 jobs right away to boost efficiency, he says. The bank's net revenue per employee was about $218,000 in 2007. That compares with $395,000 at JPMorgan Chase and $1.5 million at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Rubin's Value
The new CEO also needs to retire more of the high-priced old guard, Smith says. That includes Robert Rubin, a former U.S. Treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton and, before that, a co-chairman of Goldman Sachs. Rubin joined Citi in 1999 as what he called a consigliere to co-CEOs Reed and Weill. He has since been paid more than $150 million.
Smith asks where Rubin was when Citi was buying billions in assets backed by subprime loans. CEO Prince, a lawyer with no capital markets background, could have used some advice, he says.
``Rubin is an embarrassment,'' he concludes.
Rubin, in an interview, says he has never had a role in the bank's daily operations. He's been talking with Pandit about his future at the bank, he says. ``I've told Vikrman that I will remain active with him and the place, he says. ``And I will work with clients, which I like to do.''
As for staying out of the bank's trading business, Rubin says it's wrong for senior managers to tell people what to do. ``The only ones who are really going to know what's in those books are the people who run the trading operation and the people in independent risk management,'' he says. ``You can't know if you aren't there. It's really a full-time job.''
Novice CEO
The credit crisis now gripping global markets was missed by almost everyone, Rubin says. ``What almost nobody saw was the confluence of factors that turned out to be something of a perfect storm -- low interest rates, reaching for yield, the increased use of financial engineering, and triple-A ratings for certain subprime securities,'' he says.
Pandit himself is being scrutinized for his low-key, professorial style and dearth of experience in consumer banking, the source of more than half of the bank's profit, says Richard Bove, an analyst at Lutz, Florida-based Ladenburg Thalmann Financial Services Inc.
``He's never run anything like this ever before in his life,'' Bove says. ``He can't put it all together in less than five years. He's learning on the job.''
Even as he tries to reorganize Citi, Pandit has holes to plug in the bank's leaky hull. Citi is sitting on billions more in mortgage loans and other securities whose value may have to be written down. In addition, the bank lists about $1 trillion in assets that aren't currently on its balance sheet, including $363 billion in unconsolidated ``variable interest entities'' and $760 billion in ``qualified special purpose entities,'' according to regulatory filings.
New accounting regulations may force Citi to put some of them on its books.
New Writedowns
On July 18, Citi said it lost $2.5 billion in the second quarter, including $7.2 billion in new writedowns related to subprime assets and debt linked to bond insurers. The bank's credit costs, including charge-offs related to bad loans and money set aside for future bad loans, jumped $4.5 billion from a year earlier.
In the investment bank, which posted a loss of $2 billion, revenue was $2.9 billion, down 71 percent from a year earlier. In the consumer bank, which has 8,500 branches worldwide -- just 859 of them in the U.S. -- revenue was $7.8 billion, about the same as last year. That unit posted a $700 million loss.
In global credit cards, a division run by Steven Freiberg that Pandit created by combining U.S. and international card operations in March, profit was $467 million, down 56 percent from a year earlier. Revenue rose 3 percent to $5.5 billion.
In Krawcheck's Global Wealth Management arm, net income declined 21 percent to $405 million. Revenue rose 4 percent to $3.3 billion.
`Rough Ride'
Citi Chief Financial Officer Gary Crittenden says problems related to souring loans will resolve themselves over time. What keeps him up at night, he says, is the crumbling U.S. economy.
``The country's in for a rough ride and that's going to make our job harder,'' he says. The crisis has been feeding on itself. As long as defaults on loans are rising, he says, the bank will have to curtail issuing new credit.
Crittenden says Citigroup is already turning away executives asking for corporate loans, unless they already do business with the bank. ``Three or four years from now, you will generally find that banks have fewer client relationships, but they will be deeper,'' he says.
Smith says that one of Citigroup's biggest liabilities is that it's the archetype of a failed model: the universal bank.
``We have 10 years and 41 quarters of failed performance at Citi to show us the universal bank doesn't work,'' he says.
Pandit embraces his multipurpose bank and says he will resist all calls to dismantle it. ``What we've got here is a truly global universal bank, with a set of assets and a footprint that is hard to replicate,'' he says.
Accessing the World
He cites Mexico's Banamex as an example. Banamex is a local bank, he says; yet, the fact that it's part of Citi allows it to invest for its customers anywhere. ``They can access the world through the Citi network. People talk about it; we can actually do it.''
The Mexican bank, which boasts 1,603 retail branches from Tijuana to Oaxaca, signed up 1.4 million new retail customers last year; revenue rose 49 percent from 2004 to '07, and profits at its consumer bank increased 42 percent.
``The Citi leadership committee has been talking about what to expect from the world,'' says Medina-Mora, who joined Banamex, where his grandfather worked, in 1971. ``And we see a world that's growing at two different speeds. Vikram is saying, clearly, that a big part of our future lies in the emerging markets. This is where the demographics are going to be in our favor.''
Weill Still Believes
Pandit is eager to replicate the Mexican franchise in India and China. The bank has a 100-year history in both countries. In China, it's been opening new branches and was recently cleared to issue debit cards. In India, it has about 40 retail branches, 450 ATMs and 450 consumer finance offices. It serves private-wealth clients and has 4,000 corporate accounts.
Former CEO Weill, 75, has no doubt that the universal model creates value for investors. He now goes to work every day on the 46th floor of the white-marble General Motors Building in Manhattan. Among the dozens of mementos in Weill's suite of large, sunny rooms -- the rent is paid by Citi -- is a framed group of three graphs.
Weill points to one that plots stock performance from the day he took consumer lender Commercial Credit public in October 1986 to the day he retired as Citi CEO in October 2003. The rising red line shows a return of 2,699 percent.
Warren Buffett
The graph's other lines show shares of Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc., up 2,588 percent; Maurice ``Hank'' Greenberg's American International Group Inc., up 976 percent; and Jack Welch's General Electric Co., up 840 percent.
``In the financial business, companies don't have unique products,'' Weill says. ``It's about how they deliver the product. Citi has to be the low-cost producer again. That's where the winners are going to come from, and I think they know that.''
The best day of Weill's career, he says, was April 6, 1998, when he and Reed announced the $80 billion merger of insurance giant Travelers Group Inc. -- which contained bond trader Salomon Brothers and broker Smith Barney -- and Citicorp.
They promised a new kind of bank, a company so vast and coordinated that corporate and retail customers alike would shed other financial service providers. Profit would soar as Citi cross-sold credit cards, insurance, commercial loans and merger advice to its retail and commercial customers.
Reed's Regret
Weill still believes in the model. Reed, 69, does not.
``I'd like to say that it worked, but it didn't,'' he says in a phone interview from his home on Ile de Re, off the coast of France. ``The stockholders have not done well. From a people point of view, it's been nothing but turmoil. The customer franchises are weaker than they were.''
Reed sold all his shares in Citi, where he worked from 1964 to 2000, when he left, he says.
Some current and former Citi executives place the blame for the firm's troubles on Weill's shoulders. He refused to spend enough on technology and failed to integrate the new companies he acquired, say people familiar with the matter. As co-CEO with Reed, and then sole leader until 2003, Weill drove Citigroup to record profits by adding companies and squeezing out costs.
One of his biggest purchases, in 2001, was Associates First Capital Corp., a consumer lender that's part of today's 1,215- branch CitiFinancial network. CitiFinancial makes mortgage, auto and other loans to consumers.
Yet its branches don't have the software to enable its salespeople to offer an array of credit cards to its customers, says a person familiar with the operation.
Technology Bloat
``Each business has been operating with its own back office,'' Pandit told investors and analysts gathered in New York on May 9. ``We have 140,000 people in IT and operations. We have 16 database standards. We have 25,000 developers. This results not only in waste but doesn't give us any opportunity to leverage our organization. That's massively inefficient. We're finally going to merge it all.''
If a doctor of finance can solve these problems, Vikram Shankar Pandit is well qualified. He was born in Nagpur, in the central Indian state of Maharashtra, on Jan. 14, 1957.
His father, Shankar, worked for Ambalal Sarabhai Group, an Indian pharmaceuticals company, according to a December article on the Indian Web site Rediff.com. The family moved often, and young Vikram attended five or six schools as a child, his now 86- year-old father told Rediff.com.
Four Degrees
``He always stood first in his class wherever he was,'' the elder Pandit said.
Shankar Pandit's business travels included a stint in Mombasa, Kenya, when Vikram was 12, and a move to New York when his son was 16. In 1973, Vikram began commuting from his parents' apartment in Rego Park in the borough of Queens to Columbia University, the Ivy League school on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
Pandit earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering in 1976; a master's degree in engineering in 1977; a Master of Business Administration in 1980, at age 23; and a doctorate in finance in 1986.
Pandit joined Columbia's board of trustees in 2003. ``Vikram took on a very significant leadership role on the board with the fewest words spoken of anyone,'' says Columbia President Lee Bollinger. Pandit has been advising the 24-member board on how the university, with 23,000 students, can become a global institution. ``That has been very valuable to me,'' Bollinger says.
`Not a Cheerleader'
Pandit hasn't fully embraced his role as a public figure. He refused to be photographed for this story.
At Citi's annual presentation for analysts and investors, a four-hour May meeting with no break and dozens of PowerPoint slides, he spoke largely from teleprompters in a style reminiscent of a university lecture.
``He's not a cheerleader,'' Rubin says. ``Vikram's style is more leadership by intellect and conviction; he really believes.''
While working on his doctoral thesis, Pandit took a job in 1981 as an assistant professor at Indiana University in Bloomington. After less than two years, he jumped to Wall Street.
Joining Morgan Stanley
``There was all this interesting stuff going on in academia about capital markets and how they behave and where they might go,'' Pandit says. ``It was fascinating to think about actually making it work. That's what made me shift.''
Pandit joined Morgan Stanley in 1983, taking a job in the equities division, where, among other projects, he built the firm's prime brokerage.
In September 2000, he was promoted to oversee trading and sales as co-president of institutional securities with Stephan Newhouse.
In the third quarter of 2003, their unit was the firm's biggest moneymaker, bringing in 65 percent of Morgan Stanley's profit.
When Newhouse was named president of the New York-based firm under CEO Philip Purcell, Pandit became sole head of institutional securities, overseeing about 8,000 people.
$18.5 Million Paycheck
In 2004, the firm ranked No. 1 in arranging global and U.S. equity offerings, according to Bloomberg data. Pandit brought home $18.5 million that year.
Newhouse says the two worked well together. ``We split the labor,'' Newhouse says. ``He's not given to bombast or temper, and he tends to work methodically. It's very difficult to get him excited.''
That doesn't mean Pandit isn't ambitious. In 2005, he was in the thick of it when a battle broke out between Purcell and Morgan Stanley shareholders and former executives. Early that year, eight former executives wrote Purcell a letter that criticized his leadership.
In response, on March 28, Purcell reshuffled the investment bank's executive suite, naming Zoe Cruz and Stephen Crawford as co-presidents. Pandit had been Cruz's boss. He and Havens resigned the next day.
Purcell himself stepped down in June. Later that year, Pandit got a $9.04 million payout package from Morgan Stanley; Havens got $7.9 million. Crawford left a month after Purcell, and Cruz was pushed out -- a victim of Morgan Stanley's subprime- related writedowns -- in November 2007.
Hedge Fund Rookies
In March 2006, Pandit and Havens announced they'd raised $2 billion and were starting a hedge fund they called Old Lane. The pair hired two dozen fellow Morgan Stanley alumni to help run the fund.
Just six months after Old Lane's debut, Citi came courting. Prince needed help in Citi's alternative investments division, and Pandit and Havens had the background the bank was looking for, says Lewis Kaden, a Citigroup vice chairman who Prince hired in 2005 as chief administrative officer.
To get Pandit, Citi was willing to buy Old Lane. It took two tries, Kaden says. After weeks of negotiating in the fall of 2006, Pandit called Kaden on Christmas Eve and said his group had decided not to sell. Two months later, Old Lane's owners changed their minds.
Citi bought the firm, then a $4.2 billion fund, for about $800 million, according to people familiar with the agreement. Pandit's take was about $170 million, of which $100 million was to stay in the fund, according to a regulatory filing.
`Feeding Frenzy'
Analysts of the deal said Citi paid too much. ``Almost everyone that bought a hedge fund in that period overpaid,'' says Geoff Bobroff, a consultant to asset managers who's based in East Greenwich, Rhode Island. ``There was a feeding frenzy.''
In June, Citi closed Old Lane, which returned 2.8 percent in 2007, and took a $202 million writedown on its investment. Citi officials say the hedge fund's holdings have either been disbursed to its clients or are still being managed inside the firm.
After Pandit arrived at Citi in July 2007, he rose quickly. In September, Prince put him in charge of the institutional client group, the Citi business based in lower Manhattan that includes investment banking, capital markets and corporate lending.
A few weeks later, after CFO Crittenden telephoned Prince to let him know the bank would take a new writedown, Prince resigned.
Pandit was on the shortlist of possible new CEOs from the beginning. ``The strengths they saw were obvious,'' Kaden says. ``He's smart, thoughtful and focused on talent and risk management. He's well regarded by people on the outside.''
Decision Maker
The board was looking for a decisive leader, says Rubin, who was a member of the four-man selection committee. ``The question was, if you come into something like this -- probably the most important job in financial services anywhere -- would he be willing to make major decisions?'' Rubin says. ``He's turned out to be able to do exactly that.''
Rubin cites the decision to name regional CEOs as an example. Citi executives talked about regional management for years, he says, and never came to a conclusion.
``Then Vikram came in here and sat down and listened to people,'' he says. ``He's sort of like President Clinton in that way. He wants to hear pros and cons, and then he decides.''
Citi's 17-member board did not name Pandit chairman, a role held by Winfried Bischoff, a former chairman of Citi in Europe.
Beyond organizational issues, Pandit's top goal is to cut costs. CFO Crittenden, 51, is leading a so-called reengineering effort that will save about $15 billion over three years, he says.
Efficiency Ratio
A slim, personable Utah native with degrees from Brigham Young University and Harvard Business School, Crittenden has worked as CFO of American Express Cos., Monsanto Corp. and Sears Roebuck & Co. He aims to bring the bank's efficiency ratio, a calculation of revenue compared with expenses, to 58 percent, down from 62 percent in the first quarter of 2008.
Pandit says he's been getting e-mails from employees pointing out inefficiencies they've observed for years. The company spends about $1.3 billion a year on printing, he says, an area where he thinks Citi can get a better deal.
``There are examples of things like this everywhere in this organization, and I kind of think that's great,'' he says. ``It's low-hanging fruit.''
Apte, the new CEO for Central Europe, says he and his executives have been meeting since March to redesign operations for the region. He says making obvious changes -- such as closing overlapping branches -- will mean an immediate 15 to 20 percent reduction in headcount and expenses in countries such as Poland.
Revamping ICG
At the heart of Citi, and its huge losses in the past year, is the institutional client group, or ICG, the Wall Street arm of the vast bank.
The unit houses sales and trading, investment banking, corporate and commercial lending, hedge funds, transaction services -- that's cash management and trade processing -- and private equity. After running it for three months last fall, Pandit put Havens, his closest lieutenant, in charge.
On a record 97-degree-Fahrenheit (36-degree-Celsius) day in early June, Havens sits in a library on the 39th floor of the unit's downtown Manhattan headquarters wearing a navy pinstripe suit and suspenders embroidered with British pound symbols. He's just returned from Hong Kong, Shanghai and Tokyo, a trip so quick he didn't have time for jet lag, he says.
Moving Day
In his first nine weeks on the job, Havens has made a host of changes. To improve communications among the unit's bosses, he's moved to the same floor the offices of all ICG executives, including investment banking chief Ray McGuire, sales and trading head James Forese and transaction services boss Paul Galant.
He and Richard Evans, the unit's new risk manager, hired in April from Deutsche Bank AG, have worked out new trading rules to avoid any repeat of the subprime mess. He's stripping some of the risk out of the division by building up Citi's prime brokerage, equities and commodities units, which are geared to generate steady fees.
``We're trying to diversify our revenue stream and earnings away from the credit cycle,'' Havens says. ``Some people are saying we are pulling back from the client. That's nonsense. But are we going to be everything to everybody? No. That's not a good model.''
Havens is determined to rally his troops. Morale has stagnated for years in Citi's investment bank, some employees say, in part because of the lingering ghosts of banks such as Salomon Brothers, the bond trading firm that Weill bought in 1997, and Schroders, the British advisory company purchased in 2000.
Cliques
Bankers from those organizations formed cliques within Citi that prevented the corporate culture from jelling, say current and former investment bank employees.
``Over the years, we've had some very unique and powerful cultures within this organization,'' Havens says. ``The question now is, 'What are we going to do about it?'''
What Havens is doing is walking the trading floors and hosting Friday breakfasts with groups of 20 managing directors. He has met, one-on-one, with at least 300 current and potential employees. He initiated a 7:30 a.m. global conference call every Monday for the 65,000 people who work for him, to offer company updates and market insight for the week ahead.
That kind of meeting, a long tradition at Morgan Stanley, has never been a regular practice at Citi. So far, about 6,000 have been dialing in, according to people familiar with the matter.
Pandit and Havens are also changing the way bankers earn their bonuses, basing incentive pay on team and firm-wide goals, as opposed to payment for individual performance. They want to send a clear signal, they say, that from now on everyone at Citigroup will be working toward a common goal.
`It's All Here'
``It's all here; it's a hell of a firm,'' Havens says. ``We just have to get it together.''
Havens echoes Pandit in saying that some of Citi's most important franchises are in places such as Mexico, India and China. When he worked for Morgan Stanley and needed to get information to do business in an emerging-market country, he would first dial up the local Citibank manager, he says.
``We would always call the Citi guy on the ground to figure out what we needed to do to get something done there,'' Havens says. ``And they were probably going to be our local bank.''
Pandit says size is crucial to pulling Citigroup out of the ditch. ``We have to get our shop in order,'' he says. ``But the beauty of this place is that we can spot trends sooner than anybody else because of the scope and scale of who we are.''
With tens of billions of losses already on the books -- and more red ink and writedowns predicted -- getting the Citigroup shop in order could be a multiyear project. What Pandit proposes to do is keep the bank on the path set for it by Weill, yet run it better.
The question is whether the quiet, intellectual CEO can convince long-suffering Citi stockholders that his plan is the right one.
No comments:
Post a Comment