People

The Good Life?

Dermot Boden is going from a place where life's good to a Citi that never sleeps.

The longtime marketing executive was hired this week by Citigroup Inc. as chief brand officer, overseeing global branding and sponsorship activities, and ensuring that branding and marketing are consistent across the range of Citi's businesses.

Boden joins from LG Electronics (slogan: Life's Good), where he has served as global chief marketing officer since 2007. He previously worked for Pfizer and for Johnson & Johnson, and his experience includes posts in the United States, Europe and Asia.

"As Citi approaches its 200th anniversary next year, effectively communicating who we are and what we stand for takes on renewed importance and will help determine our success going forward," Citi Chief Executive Vikram Pandit said in a press release announcing Boden's hiring. Boden will report to Edward Skyler, Citi's executive vice president for public affairs.

Money Shot

Score one for BB&T Corp.

The Winston-Salem, N.C., bank, a major sponsor of the Atlantic Coast Conference, offered two lucky contestants the chance to win $1 million during the March 11 match-up between Duke University and the University of Maryland at the ACC men's basketball tournament. All they had to do was make three consecutive bank shots from the three-point range.

But BB&T ended up walking away the winner, keeping its $1 million after the two contestants — Joseph Palumbo of Deltona, Fla., representing Florida State University, and James Windham of Bradenton, Fla., representing Wake Forest University — fell short of the goal.

"Unfortunately we didn't get to give away a million dollars, but everyone had a great time!" the bank posted on the contest's Facebook page.

Fans were encouraged during the regular season to register for the BB&T Million Dollar Bank Shot Challenge at BBT.com/ACC and name the ACC school they represent. Twelve contestants were picked at random to receive a trip for two to the ACC tournament in Greensboro, N.C.

During halftime of an earlier tournament game, the pool of 12 contestants was narrowed to two finalists to compete for the million dollars.

"We didn't have a million-dollar winner, but we did have some incredible people to represent the teams of the ACC," the bank said on Facebook.

Generation Gap

John Ikard, head of FirstBank Holding Co. of Colorado, has a little parlor game he likes to play when he gets the junior officers of his company together. It's called Who Has the Most Money in Their Wallet.

"Usually the guy with six bucks wins," Ikard said Sunday in Miami at American Banker's Best Practices in Retail Banking Symposium, during a keynote address in which he highlighted the challenges of catering to a tech-savvy generation that relies heavily on debit cards and hardly at all on bank branches. "Those are going to be our customers in our future. How do we get to them? I do worry about that."

Young people don't believe in keeping emergency cash on hand the way their parents often do. They simply don't see the need, not when their debit cards allow them to purchase just about everything they think they might need.

Ikard, one of American Banker's 2010 Community Bankers of the Year, also lamented that the only time his four children go into bank branches is when they are looking to open an account. But it's not just the younger generation he and other bankers have to worry about.

"If I didn't work at a bank," Ikard said, "I would never go in a bank."

Core Understanding

Two weeks ago in this space we reported on the almost comic fanfare with which the Federal Reserve Bank of New York announced President William Dudley's plans to visit the borough of Queens. A press release befitting a State Department mission abroad mentioned that press contacts would be "traveling with Mr. Dudley" during the daylong field trip, the stated purpose of which included "outreach efforts" and a chance to "learn more about conditions in the region."

What ensued was a downright culture clash. During one speech, Dudley argued that rising prices for commodities have been offset by falling prices for other goods, pointing to the latest iPad from Apple, which costs the same as the older model but offers greater computing power. According to press reports, the example prompted "guffaws" in the audience, with one person replying, "I can't eat an iPad."

The moral of the story, whether you are a retail banker trying to defend a plan to raise fees tied to checking accounts or a central banker trying to defend the exclusion of food and gas prices from core inflation measurements, is that an angry public does not much care about your justifications, no matter how sound your reasoning.

As former President Clinton said, sometimes people just want to know that someone in power feels their pain.

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