Sad about Citigroup

Although I've been retired from Citi for nearly a decade, I still view what is happening to that organization with sadness beyond what I feel about the negligible value of my remaining Citi stock.

The sadness, I think, is really about how that bank, whenever it decided that business opportunities were so important that risk can be ignored, has gotten into trouble -- although, in the past, we were generally able to pull things back from the brink. A secondary sadness involves the now-traditional Citi tendency to punish the messenger who brings the bad news, but I don't think that Citi has any claim of exclusivity here.

Happiness about my years at Citi, on the other hand, is definitely still there. I still remember the decade I spent in the Consumer Bank's loss prevention unit, when we (in no particular order) (1) discovered that it was possible to manage operational risk in a near-realtime mode and save the bank literally $ millions in fraud and operating losses already in progress (2) facilitated this knowledge transfer to Citi's credit card division (who said that the Citi silos were totally impervious to good ideas?) -- you can see the evidence of this knowledge transfer each time you receive a call from your credit card issuer asking about a purchase you've made that doesn't fit your profile (3) averted massive fines and penalties for what would have been violations of unusual currency reporting regulations by building technology that tracked such things; it was far more advanced technology than our counterpart banks in the NY Clearing House had (4) turned what could have been the debacle of Regulation CC into a web of new consumer services that helped the customer avoid bouncing checks while still effectively protecting the bank from kites (5) a few other things that I haven't had occasion to think of in nearly 20 years.

Conversely, I still remember the situations where Citi overreached: (1) when, in the early 1990s, there was huge pressure to book new mortgages in the branches just so the origination fees would hit the revenue side of the financials, with no concern for the backlog of nearly 5000 unprocessed mortgage applications that had accumulated in the back office (I helped knock that backlog down). (2) when, back in the 1970s, the Operating Group decided to cut over from a paper-based system for transferring securities to an on-line process with no parallel testing; parallel testing being perceived to be a waste of time -- I mercifully did not have to get involved in that one, but the "rock" of fails and differences was still being worked down a decade later. (3) when, circa 1998, our team of in-house encryption experts were told unequivocally that we were not permitted to have any contact at all with the newly acquired Smith Barney -- not even to include them as copies on policy memoranda (I still have no idea what that was all about). (4) when, again circa 1998, I was running projects converting Citi corporate and financial industry customers off insecure older funds transfer systems onto a modern, secure one, and I noticed that there was one company using the obsolete FICCM system -- a system notable for lack of both audit trails and user accountability -- that originated an order of magnitude more $$ of transfers than any other user of the system -- and I was told unequivocally that I was not to bother this particular customer with suggestions that they convert to a more secure system, that this customer (which happened to be named Enron) was the Way, the Truth, and the Light, a virtually perfect customer, and definitely the future of Citi.

Anyway, I see that the inmates finally succeeded in taking over the asylum. It's too bad. At one time, we at Citibank were really, REALLY good at risk management. Sic transit gloria Citi.