Cit’s top consumer banking executive Manuel Medina-Mora who came to this post after successfully revitalizing Citi’s Mexican subsidiary Bacomer, has set a global strategy for Citi’s consumer operations that looks to leverage their unique presence in more than 100 countries.
The strategy will focus on the top 150 global major metropolitan areas
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Those cities, which account for 30% of global gross domestic product, include 16 U.S. metropolitan areas, 18 cities in other parts of the developed world and 116 in emerging-market countries. From Los Angeles to Seoul to Rio de Janeiro, the company says, it has found common financial needs specific to urban customers, along with demographics it has long been suspected of wanting to target: the affluent and the upwardly mobile.
Offering Citi’s most thorough retail strategy update in years, Medina-Mora said the company already has retail customers in 120 of the cities on its priority list, spread across the 40 countries in which its consumer division operates. “We have a consumer presence in 80% of what we believe will be the most attractive markets in global consumer banking,” he told investors at a Bank of America Merrill Lynch financial services conference. “We are not starting from scratch.”
As part of this strategy Citi will expand in the US and spend 43 billion to overhaul its “one of everything” technology infrastructure so Citi has a consistent set of capabilities that they can offer worldwide.
Citi has tried this before but because of the complexity of matching the retail banking regulations in over a hundred countries around the world, the leader who set the standardization agenda was gone before the new system was implemented in the first country.
I hope Medina-More has better luck at driving this agenda than his predecessors.
For more information you can find this article at:
http://www.americanbanker.com/issues/175_222/new-citi-consumer-banking-strategy-1028862-1.html
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