Managing Director, Head of Business Development, Institutional Clients Group
Emily Turner has done some of the most innovative jobs at Citi, but the coolest ideas are not always the most interesting when it comes to bank-based venture capital, she said.
“A lot of things we do are boring but add value for our customers by solving problems that have been around forever,” said the London-based executive, an American who moved to the U.K. in 2005 and worked at ABN Amro and McKinsey before joining Citi in 2011.
Take proxy voting, for instance. “In a world in which investors want to have more of a say in how the companies in which they invest are run, making it easier for investors to have a say, and without huge latency, is a problem that’s been around for a long time,” Turner said.
When two Citi employees proposed helping investors vote the proxies of the stocks they owned, it fell to Turner, then the head of Citi Ventures UK, to figure out how to turn the idea into a business. Designed on a whiteboard, the prototype was developed within Citi’s own labs and launched within a year. In 2020, Citi spun out the new company, Proxymity, with several large custodians as investors and users.
The team Turner oversees made 26 investments in 2021. During the pandemic, Turner also oversaw the launch of a new marketplace to connect small businesses seeking loans with community banks, dubbed Bridge Built by Citi. And her group worked with Bank of America on a new credit trading and data platform, Octopus, that began testing last year.
Turner credited her “amazing group of mentors,” both men and women, with investing in her career. One mentor who stands out: Okan Pekin, head of Citi's Securities Services, who worked with Turner as they developed Proxymity. “He understands and has taught me that behind leading a business to growth, there are cultural, technical and product transformations needed,” she said. She now serves as a mentor, both formally and informally, to others at the bank, including through the Caliber program for Black employees in the operations and technology group.
She also tries to learn from people who think differently, like a former colleague who had been a police officer and led Turner to take a more guarded perspective on risk management. “I’ve sought out people who I think are impressive, not just those like me or who I’d be friends with,” she said.
Taking seriously her drive to look at things from another angle, in 2019 Turner took a sabbatical from Citi. She volunteered at hunger-fighting nonprofit, God’s Love We Deliver, and interned at the car payments startup Car IQ, in which Citi Ventures invested. Now she often fields calls from colleagues who want to sign up for the sabbatical program.
“I have seen how Emily leads with empathy and how colleagues seek the opportunity to work with and for her,” wrote Paco Ybarra, Turner’s boss as CEO of Citi’s Institutional Clients Group, who nominated her. “She ensures her team of 257 have a career growth trajectory and the support to achieve their goals.”
