Most Powerful Women in Banking | Top Teams: Citigroup

October 6, 2021 12:00 AM

Enjoy complimentary access to top ideas and insights — selected by our editors.

As part of American Banker's Most Powerful Women in Banking and Finance program, we have selected five "Top Teams" for 2021. Citigroup is one of the team honorees.

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To see the evaluation criteria for the Top Teams category, please scroll to the end.

Citigroup
Headquarters: New York
Assets: $2.2 trillion
Female representation among corporate officers: 45%
Female representation on operating committee: 19%

Diversity initiatives

Citigroup is on a journey to transform the diversity of its workforce, and in March it hired a chief diversity equity and inclusion officer and global head of talent, Erika Irish Brown, to help keep the momentum going. Citi also has been open about the progress it is making along the way, keeping itself publicly accountable.

In January 2020, its existing standards requiring a diverse slate of candidates for managing director and director hires expanded to also include assistant vice president, vice president and senior vice president levels. Last year 86% of global roles at these levels included diverse candidates with at least one woman or U.S. ethnic minority. This year the standard increased to at least two women or minorities on the slate of those getting job interviews for U.S. hires and at least two women for global hires.

Perhaps the diverse slates are already helping. Citi promoted 70 women to managing directors last year — the most ever — representing 29%, up from 28% for the class of 2019. The company is working to increase representation at the assistant vice president through managing director levels to at least 40% for women globally and 8% for Black employees in the United States by the end of 2021.

The 2020 summer intern class was the most diverse ever, with women in analyst and associate roles reaching 52% in the U.S. and 50% globally. Black and Hispanic/Latino representation was at 27% in the U.S.

Amid the high anxiety on many fronts during the past year, several employee resource groups at the company came up with some targeted ways to provide female Black colleagues with more career support. The Citi Women program and Black Heritage Affinity Steering Committee worked together to create a Black Women's Empowerment forum to provide senior Black female executives an opportunity to share their expertise with Black female employees across the company, from assistant vice presidents to senior vice presidents.

In addition, women make up 50% of Citigroup’s board.

Selected executive highlights:

Karen Peetz

Chief Administrative Officer

Peetz, a former BNY Mellon president, came out of retirement in 2020 to take on a new position at Citi as chief administrative officer. She coordinates communications with regulators globally and is driving a cultural shift to increase accountability, improve and automate controls, and modernize data infrastructure.

A key piece of her work is responding to

consent orders

that the Federal Reserve Board and the Office of the Comptroller of the Comptroller of the Currency announced in October last year. The following month — in Peetz’s first public appearance in the new role — she talked about

Citi’s plan to overhaul its risk management

Gina Nisbeth

Director of Citi Community Capital

As a director in the structured lending and investments group of Citi Community Capital, Nisbeth manages the company’s $1 billion New Markets Tax Credit investments and its $800 million community development-focused private equity investments. In her role, she helps provide capital to business owners and real estate projects that create jobs, expand affordable housing, improve health outcomes, educate youth and build wealth across the country.

This year Nisbeth led Citi's $200 million private equity investment in the Emerging Manager Preservation Funds, partnering with five racially diverse fund managers. As part of the same initiative, Nisbeth is deploying $50 million in loan participations with minority-owned banks for affordable housing preservation and development. She is taking a much more personal approach to her work for the next year, though. On July 1 she started working directly with the minority-owned Unity Bank to help it create revenue-generating opportunities.

Elinor Hoover

Chair of Global Consumer Retail

In March, Hoover, who had been the global co-head of consumer products in Citi’s corporate and investment banking division, was named chair of the global consumer group. The bigger title followed her global consumer products group achieving for the first time the top wallet share position. It had been ranked third and fourth in years prior to moving into the top slot in the first few months of 2021, on a 40% spike in revenue for that period year over year.

As chair, Hoover is overseeing a collaborative initiative with the technology group targeting high-growth clients in consumer tech. She had launched the initiative several years ago to attract new types of clients to Citi, as she saw an opportunity to tap into an emerging mega trend that would drive consumer behavior over the coming decade. Her focus is on tech-enabled consumer brands with a mission of sustainability, and concentrated in health and wellness across the food, fitness, beauty and hospitality sectors. She said these companies often do not easily fit into one particular sector that aligns neatly with the way investment banking is organized, so in her new role, she has created cross-sector “tiger teams” for each account, regardless of whether it might have been categorized previously as consumer, retail, tech or healthcare.

Hoover also is tasked with continuing to grow important strategic areas of capital markets for Citi, such as underwritings for special-purpose acquisition companies and advisory work on mergers and acquisitions involving SPACs, both of which have been major revenue drivers. She has been a speaker at numerous SPAC-themed conferences as a result of that work.

Sara Wechter

Chief Human Resources Officer

Wechter was instrumental in helping push Citi out of its comfort zone to

disclose its unadjusted, or “raw,” pay gap for women

and U.S. minorities four years ago. She is also instrumental in creating and implementing the policies that will help Citi achieve its goals in closing that gap, such as the policy requiring diverse slates of candidates for job openings.

Unlike the adjusted pay analysis, which is a measure of whether women and minorities are paid similarly to their white, male counterparts for similar jobs, the raw pay gap is a measure that shows to what degree women and minorities tend to occupy the lower-paying jobs in greater numbers, but thin out farther up in the management and executive roles. This year's raw pay gap analysis at Citi showed that the median pay for women globally is just above 74% of the median for men (up from 73% last year and 71% in 2018), and that the median pay for U.S. minorities is nearly 94% of the median for non-minorities (similar to last year, but up from 93% in 2018).

Citi also introduced some new programs that it expects will help with employee retention, perhaps especially so for female employees. A 12-week sabbatical program allows employees who have been at Citi for at least five years — at any level — to take time off for any reason and receive 25% of their base pay while doing so. Employees are able to take no more than two sabbaticals.

A pro bono program, also for employees who have been with Citi for five years or more, allows them to spend two to four weeks working with a charitable institution while still receiving 100% of their base pay. And a vacation purchase program that allows employees to buy up to five additional days of planned time off each year.

In addition, with the onset of the pandemic, Citi doubled its subsidized back-up child care benefit to 40 days and began providing access to academic support and group learning for children of U.S. employees

Chinwe Esimai

Chief Anti-Bribery Officer

Esimai oversees Citi's framework for adhering with anti-bribery and corruption regulations around the world. Her role covers all Citi business lines and all employees.

Outside of that role, as part of her involvement as a leader of Citi's Black Heritage Affinity Steering Committee, she is responsible for the strategic oversight of committee activities across the company, including Black History Month events, panel discussions, internal communications, counsel on recruitment and retention efforts and more.

Esimai also has served as a lead facilitator and coach for Citi's Owning My Success program, a development program for Black employees from vice president to managing director levels.

The team

Titi Cole, Nikki Darden, Chinwe Esimai, Bridget Fawcett, Jane Fraser, Pam Habner, Jo-Anne Kelly, Brandee McHale, Donna McNamara, Mary McNiff, Gina Nisbeth, Bola Oyesanya, Karen Peetz, Jessica Roos, Harlin Singh Urofsky, Val Smith, Sara Wechter, Elree Winnett Seelig

Citi also had a Top Team win in 2019.

See the other 2021 Top Teams:

What it takes

In the Top Teams category, each bank is evaluated based on:

The presence and influence of women in the senior ranks
The performance of women-led business units
Demonstrated commitment to and progress toward fostering diversity (and specifically female participation) in senior leadership and key roles with P&L responsibility
Improvements shown in the representation of women in the pipeline
Programs, policies and practices that are effective in fostering success in the areas above