Wall Street’s most powerful woman could be gearing up to let 10% of her staff go, according to a new report.
Earlier this year, Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser announced that the lender would be making sweeping internal changes, which she insisted would smooth out corporate hierarchies and streamline decision-making processes.
CNBC reported on Monday that managers and consultants working on the bank’s restructuring had since discussed laying off at least one in 10 workers across several of its major businesses.
Citing sources with inside knowledge of the ongoing process, CNBC noted that the number of job cuts could shift in the coming weeks, as talks were still in the early stages.
According to CNBC, Citigroup’s restructuring process has become known internally as “Project Bora Bora.”
A spokesperson for Citigroup saidin an emailed statement on Tuesday that the bank was “committed to delivering the full potential of the bank and meeting our commitments to our stakeholders.”
“We’ve acknowledged the actions we’re taking to reorganize the firm involve some difficult, consequential decisions, but they’re the right steps to align our structure to our strategy and deliver the plan we shared at our 2022 Investor Day,” they said.
Clear-cut case for change
At Citigroup’s Investor Day last year, Fraser said there was “a clear-cut case for change at Citi.”
“We're acting on it, positioning our firm's long-term future and tackling the issues that have held us back head on,” she told investors at the time. “It is going to take time, but I'm fully committed to doing the hard work to get this bank to where it needs to be.”
Fraser—who stepped into the bank’s top job in 2021—is the first woman to lead a Wall Steet lender.
The bank touts her achievements to date as including the launch “a multi-year strategy to increase Citigroup’s profitability and better position the firm for the speed and complexities of the digital age.”
Aside from looming layoffs, her restructuring has included shuttering some of Citigroup’s international business and eliminating a layer of top management. At a conference two months ago, she labeled the strategy “the most consequential changes to how Citi will be organized and run that we've made in almost 20 years.”
Fraser first told Citigroup’s 240,000-strong workforce that layoffs were looming in September, notifying staff that the bank would be “saying goodbye to some very talented and hardworking colleagues” as it shakes up its operations. The number of jobs that would be cut was not specified at the time.
Days later, she gave staff resisting the bank’s overhaul an ultimatum: “get on board or get off the train.”
Fraser is under pressure to fix Citigroup, America’s third-biggest bank, after it received a consent order from regulators in 2020 demanding it correct a number of “serious and longstanding deficiencies” in its internal operations.
The company is also contending with share price issues, with its stock continuing to sell at less than half its tangible book value. Investors use price-to-tangible-book value ratios to measure a firm’s market value against its hard assets. That means the stock is lagging well behind many of its Wall Street competitors, such as Wells Fargo and JPMorgan.
A number of Wall Street heavyweights such as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have already been cutting jobs this year amid ongoing economic uncertainty.
