More about Citi

One concern about Citibank's long-term viability that has been simmering the back reaches of my mind for a couple of years now is whether there is still anyone employed there who knows how to run a bank. I don't just mean someone who can posture for the media and talk in code understood best by financial reporters. I mean someone who knows a routing/transit number from a cusip number, which end of a 10-K to start reading from, that a cash letter isn't a plea to the parents for more spending money. That ACH is not just the first three letters of achooo!

As I look around Citi today for familiar names, I find very, very few of them. True, a lot of the people I knew when I worked at Citi were within a decade of my age, and hence conceivably have retired on their own volition, but I also knew a lot of people at Citi who did NOT have any grey in their hair or wrinkles under their chins a decade ago -- the people who, if Citi is going to be viable in its pared down and resurrected form as a BANK, are absolutely essential for day to day operation.

Many or most of these vital folks did not have MBAs, and a good many did not have college degrees. More than a few joined Citibank a couple of decades ago because the Sanitation was not hiring when they got out of high school, but Citibank was. They started in branches as rack clerks. They started at 111 Wall Street as entry-level clericals in departments with esoteric names like returned items. A few (girls, back in the day) started at 399 Park as pages. Some (guys, mostly) started as tape-hangers in the big data centers.

Over the years, knowledge accreted to these folks, like barnacles on a ship's hull. These people, men and women, knew that if CAS was running 20 minutes late, there was a good chance that TTI would not have its network up by 7 AM and that there would be hell to pay in customer service from people who hoped to get money out of a CAT on the way to work. And, they knew what to tell the customers about it. Especially so after Branch 77, and then after Reg CC.

By the way, is CAS still running? You know, it was built in the 1970-1973 timeframe, and all the original flowcharts vanished when the elevator doors they were taped to opened (they weren't supposed to open -- that bank of cars did not stop on that floor) in the middle of the night and took them to the sump at the bottom of the elevator shafts. What wasn't lost then was lost when Bob White decreed that the vault where the CAS documentation was secured didn't need staffing, and immediately CAS was running on source code and a lot of memories.

I was happy to see Richard Parsons named as the new Chairman today. In his past he has the Dime Savings Bank rescue, and at least he knows what a bank does. Let's hope that he finds enough people still working at Citi who know what a bank does that they can have a dialog.