When Jane Fraser took over Citi in 2021, she became the first woman to run a major Wall Street bank. And she also took on one of the toughest jobs in finance, which was to simplify a sprawling global bank, modernize how it runs, and in the process win back investors. Five years in and that turnaround is really gaining ground. Jane now serves as both chair and CEO, and this year she was also number one on our Fortune Most Powerful Women list. Jane is going to join us live from New York with a conversation with Claire Zillman, who recently profiled Jane for Fortune.
Hello Claire. How are you?
I'm good. Thanks for joining us through the magic of technology. Really happy to have you.
I wish I could be with you in California. It sounds a lot more fun than rainy New York. That's for sure.
We're having a great time. And so thank you so much for being here. Ellie covered a little bit of this in your intro, but I want to go back five years to when you first got the job at Citi. The bank had long trailed Wall Street rivals on profitability, and it hadn't fully shed its reputation as this kind of bloated financial supermarket. It was one of the most daunting turnarounds on Wall Street, if not in all of business. And you were the woman for the job. When you're taking on an assignment of that magnitude, just give us a sense: where did you start?
Yeah. Look, I think you start with the basics, which is you start with a forward-looking view of the company: what does it need to be? And so I spent some time talking to all different stakeholders. So shareholders, employees, customers, competitors, and got the good, bad, and ugly feedback. And from that I got a real sense as to where the bank could really differentiate ourselves and who we should be, and then by default what we shouldn't be. And everything really built from that vision. Citi is a very global bank. We operate in 180 countries. We're on the ground in almost a hundred, and that's quite unique. And so it was building off becoming the partner for clients who have a bank with a global reach, and that we would be the partner for them, but we wouldn't be all the other things that we were. And so a lot of selling in the first year.
Right, and deciding what you're not going to be required a lot of tough decisions. I mean, you flattened management, you restructured the bank, you exited retail banking in 14 markets, and by the end of this year, Citi will have eliminated 20,000 jobs. This spring, you told me that there's a difference between making tough decisions and being... That was, those were your words.
Yes. I think I said because I've still got the British accent, but yes.
Yes, of course. How do you strike that balance, and how do you ensure that employees, maybe some of the folks that unfortunately you have to cut, how do you ensure that they feel the difference?
Yeah, look, I learned when I ran our mortgage business and had to do restructuring. It's the first time I'd done a big restructuring, and I remember standing thinking, how am I going to communicate what we need to be doing to people? And this is where I always talk about empathy: put yourselves in the audience, or put yourselves in the other person's shoes. And I remember thinking, if I'm an employee in that business, how would I want to be told about what's coming ahead? And I would want to be told straight. I would want to know, like, what is the hard truth? Just tell me what it is, and then tell me what you're going to do to help me either find another position or manage through this. And I've always found that that's been a sort of a guiding sentiment for me is, okay, if I was in the other person's shoes, what would I want to be listening to? How would I want to hear this? And straight is usually the answer there. And you do not have to be tough and unpleasant about it. But you do have to be straight.
And so some of your efforts are really starting to pay off in big ways. Yesterday, Citi posted its highest third-quarter revenue in a decade. It's one of the top-performing bank stocks this year. Last year marked the bank's highest revenue since 2010. Where do you see Citi in the lifespan of this turnaround, and what comes next?
Well, we're definitely in the more fun part of everything that's going on. We've got a lot of the heavy lifting behind us. And now what I've said to the firm is, if we are going to be the best in the businesses we're in, we have to beat the best. And so it's that mindset of excellence. And that's the next phase of the journey. We still got a few things to get done on getting things into the right shape, but so much of the energy of the firm for a while now has very much been on the front foot. And I do tease that one of the strengths of women is multitasking. We've done a lot of multitasking as a bank. We've been growing at the same time we've been restructuring. We've been fixing things at the same time we've been innovating. So it's been tiring. But now it's great because so much of the energy is about moving forward, just as the world is getting a little bit more crazy, and definitely the need to be innovating and having as much of your energy to think and to help drive things forward. I think our timing has been good.
