Citigroup is cutting hundreds of jobs
Citigroup Inc. is shedding hundreds of jobs across the company, including the Wall Street giant’s investment banking arm.
The cuts amount to less than 1% of Citigroup’s 240,000 employees, according to people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be named to discuss personnel information. Also affected are employees in the company’s operations and technology organization and the US mortgage insurance arm.
The routine cuts are part of Citigroup’s normal business planning, the people said. There is no broad mandate for managers to downsize; Instead, different divisions have grappled with different reasons for the cuts.
A spokeswoman for Citigroup declined to comment.
The move comes just weeks after competitor JPMorgan Chase & Co. laid off hundreds of mortgage workers. For its part, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. launched one of its biggest rounds of job cuts ever in January, when it planned to slash thousands of jobs across the company.
In the technology space, Citigroup has invested billions in modernizing its underlying infrastructure in recent years. Chief Executive Officer Jane Fraser has long said these investments would ultimately allow the bank to reduce its reliance on manual processes.
“As our investments in transformation and control initiatives mature, we anticipate efficiencies as these programs move from manually intensive processes to technology-enabled ones,” Fraser said in January. play video
In investment banking, on the other hand, the company is grappling with an industry-wide slowdown in transactions. The lack of activity caused the store’s sales to fall 53% last year, and analysts expect further declines in the first quarter.
Citigroup’s latest moves at its mortgage division — which is largely based in O’Fallon, Missouri — come after the bank laid off dozens of employees last year. Mortgage demand has declined in recent months amid rising prices and a rapid increase in mortgage rates.
“We are actively hiring to execute our strategy, but we are also changing pace where it makes sense given the environment in which we find ourselves,” Chief Financial Officer Mark Mason said in January. “We’re constantly scouting for talent and making sure we have the right people in the right roles, and if necessary we’ll restructure that too.”
Amid the cuts, Citigroup continues to hire and build teams to resolve two consent orders received in 2020 from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Reserve. These additions helped increase the company’s workforce by 30,000 in the last two years alone.
“We continue to invest in our transformation to meet our consent mandates and modernize our bank,” Fraser said in January. “We are streamlining and automating our processes more while improving the quality and accessibility of our data. That will make us a better bank.”
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