When Lauren Portnoi joined the technology desk for the corporate banking division of Citi in the early 2010s, she found herself working with well-established, large-cap companies.
Over the last few years, the clientele has changed dramatically, she said.
"There are companies going from zero to many-billion-dollar valuations overnight," said Portnoi, a senior banker at New York-based Citi. "We've had to learn to lend to and bank differently to an entirely new client set of pre-IPO companies and earlier stage companies, not always cash-flow positive."
Her own role has transformed along the way. In the beginning, she was inheriting relationships with large clients established by other bankers. They are important relationships and fun to work on, she said. But, she added. "To some extent, you're kind of playing catch-up on stuff that was put in place before you."
Portnoi often serves now as the initial contact for Citi's technology clients and builds relationships from scratch. "Because I've been the first person to bank them, I'm kind of the face of Citi from day one," she said. "I have tangible results to show in terms of how I've helped them to grow and helped them to increase their own sophistication and success over the years."
Her portfolio today includes 20 U.S.-based clients in both technology and professional services with subsidiaries spanning about 70 countries and territories, and manages more than $4 billion of Citi credit extensions to these clients. The clients include some of the bank's most complex and high-profile clients, including those active in artificial intelligence, the AI cloud and the AI supply chain. In 2025 alone, Portnoi helped them raise more than $25 billion in capital markets.
Her rise comes as no surprise to Jim Walsh, a former managing director in Citi corporate banking who worked alongside Portnio. He was impressed early on by her initiative and work ethic.
"She wasn't a big one for saying, 'Sorry, I couldn't get that done,'" said Walsh, who retired in 2022. "If it was in her hands, it was a safe pair of hands."
Portnoi's ability to network internally also was a strength. It helped her find answers quickly when needed, he said.
Her networking skills, in fact, were evident as soon as she came to Citi as a summer intern in the leveraged finance unit of the capital markets division.
As Portnoi sat in on approval meetings that summer, she found herself interested in what Citi's corporate bankers had to say. "They would get up and talk about the client itself, why they were raising money, how to analyze the credit," she said.
She asked around to learn where those bankers worked and landed a seat in one of Citi's first corporate banking analyst classes after the Great Recession of 2008-09.
Nearly 20 years later, Portnoi continues to enjoy the problem-solving nature of the role, which entails figuring out what bank products and services are best for a given client.
"Every day is different," she said.
