Meet the executive tasked with Citi's hardest challenge: getting the bank's house in order

In March 2023, Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser anointed Anand Selva, as the bank's chief operating officer. His mandate: oversee a deeply unsexy yet crucial initiative to regain compliance with regulators. At the time, she praised his "long track record of delivering results."

So far, Selva's tenure has been rocky.

In July, two regulators fined Citi $135.6 million for failing to make enough progress in fixing its data-management issues. The bank had agreed in 2020 to work on this problem and others, including poor risk controls, after paying $400 million in fines to the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. The OCC said in July that the bank had made "meaningful progress overall" but that the agency wanted to ensure Citi allocated enough resources to address the "persistent weaknesses" regarding data.

These new fines are despite Citi dedicating massive resources to a firmwide initiative to overhaul the bank's technology. This program, called the "Transformation" and overseen by Selva, has about 13,000 employees. Citi spent $7.4 billion on the endeavor from 2021 through 2023. This year's budget has been increased by $250 million, to more than $3 billion.

The pressure is on, with Sen. Elizabeth Warren urging the OCC to "impose growth restrictions" on Citi, arguing that it has grown "too big to manage." The regulator and Citi declined to comment.

"We've always said that progress wouldn't be linear," Fraser said after the latest fines, "and we have no doubt that we will be successful in getting our firm where it needs to be in terms of our Transformation."

For Selva, leading the Transformation is unlike any test he has faced in his three-decade career at Citi. Selva, who goes by the shortened version of his last name, Selvakesari, joined Citi as an assistant operations manager in Chennai, India, in 1991. He rose through the ranks in Asia before taking over the US consumer bank in 2019. When Fraser was made CEO in 2021, she chose Selva, who's now 57, to replace her as the global head of consumer banking.

In his current role, his mandate is to make the bank safer, not to turn a profit. To do so, he has to solve for Citi's decades of underinvestment in its infrastructure, which affects every business line of the bank.

Business Insider talked to 14 current and former Citi employees who have worked under Selva to get a picture of the challenge facing him and why he was put in charge of the bank's No. 1 priority. All but two spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing fear of reprisal or the sensitivity of regulatory matters.

Three senior executives pointed to his experience navigating regulation and working with technology from running Citi's consumer bank. Gonzalo Luchetti, Selva's successor as the head of the US consumer business, told BI that serving 70 million customers required handling tremendous operational risk.

"If we mess it up, usually you don't mess it up for one; you mess it up for hundreds of thousands, if not millions," he said. "You have to be super good at process orientation and making sure that there's high discipline and rigor."

Luchetti also emphasized Selva's longevity at Citi and experience across regions.

"He knows the fabric of the firm very well," Luchetti said. "The Transformation is about really repiping the machine. He's touched a lot of the machine himself."

But touching the machine isn't the same as fixing it. Eight employees told BI that they were surprised that Selva was made the head of the Transformation given that he had never held a leadership role in technology or compliance. They described Citi's culture as a cliquey environment that rewards managing up over results, noting that the COO promotion followed dismal performance for the wealth unit he oversaw.

"The biggest job was given to a guy who with 1 ½ years in wealth wasn't able to do anything," a former managing director said.

Selva has also come under scrutiny for a lawsuit filed against him and the bank by an ex-Transformation executive in May. Kathleen Martin, a former interim data chair, alleged that Selva pressured her to hide information from the OCC that would make Citi "look bad" and that she was fired in September 2023 after multiple refusals. Citi denied the accusations and filed a counterclaim in late August, alleging that Martin was fired for underperformance.

Citi has recently made leadership changes to Selva's unit. The bank tapped its new tech head, Tim Ryan, to lead the data effort alongside Selva and take over management of the 800-employee data team. The work on data, along with risks and controls, is paramount to the Transformation.

Splitting the burden may expedite the massive task, which requires coordinating work from employees across the entire bank. Citi declined to specify a timeline, citing the confidential nature of regulatory matters. A managing director in the Transformation estimated that the work required would take about two decades.

Mike Mayo, a Wells Fargo analyst, said that until Citi meets the requirements of the OCC and the Federal Reserve, the bank is in "regulatory purgatory."

"Citi has thrown over 10,000 people and $3 billion and more at this problem," Mayo told BI in July. "They just have to get it done."

Selva made his name at Citi by shaping its consumer-bank businesses across Asia. He led retail banking in China and India before taking over the Asia Pacific market in 2015. His approach was digital-first, eschewing branches for banking apps. Despite closing 60% of bank branches in Asia from 2016 through 2018, Selva grew deposits by 10%.

"He's very tech and digital-oriented," Luchetti said. "We've been to China together to look at startups and firms that were disrupting the world. He was always very connected with learning more about technology, had that curiosity, and then the execution chops to get it done here."

In 2019, Selva moved from Singapore to New York, where he now lives with his family, to run the US consumer bank. He assumed the global consumer-banking business from Fraser in 2021. Selva leaned on credit-card and lending offerings, launching products like Citi Custom Cash which allowed customers to pick their reward categories, and Flex Pay, a buy-now, pay-later service. Under Selva, Citi was the No. 2 issuer of credit cards in the US, and deposits grew by more than a third, to about $220 billion.

In 2021, Citi started divesting itself of more than a dozen consumer-bank markets across Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. Selva was an important player on both sides of the table, according to Adora Tidalgo, the head of operational risk management at Citi. She said he helped find Asian acquirers that maximized value for Citi while keeping the businesses running smoothly with low attrition.

"That skill of balancing how much you want to bring in terms of revenue and the credit loss you want to take is really a skill that very much needs to be honed in the consumer space," she said. "That balancing, to me, I have seen Anand over the year been very successful in doing that."

"The way that every private banker on earth thinks about relationships is you need to invest in relationships, and then as you start to do more business with clients, you start getting more and more valuable opportunities with them," one of the former managing directors said. "You have to look at the relationship. You can't just look at every single transaction."

Employees argued that Selva's playbook may have worked to build scale in Asia but not to satisfy well-heeled — and much more sought-after — US clients.

"I think Anand's decisions were comparing everything to what he knew from his time in Asia, and they are completely different markets," another former managing director said. "In Asia, Citi has a very recognizable brand, and people actually want to bank with Citi. You don't have to sell it that hard."

The wealth business' revenue dropped by 6% year over year at the end of 2022. Fraser called the division's performance "disappointing." O'Donnell's reign over wealth was cut short in January 2023, and it was later placed under Andy Sieg, the former head of Merrill Wealth Management. With Citi on a campaign to divest itself of 14 international consumer-bank markets, Selva's remit shrank.

His appointment as COO thrust him into the spotlight. Tidalgo told BI that he was no stranger to the task of dealing with regulators.

"When you are the head of a country, you are the face of Citi to the regulators. Good, bad, or indifferent, you have to face them," she said. "That's part of the job."

It can be viewed as two parts. The most visible is the strategy to simplify and modernize the bank, such as divesting Asian consumer businesses, removing five layers of management, and reorganizing so that the five business lines report directly to Fraser.

The second part is meant to address the 2020 consent orders. The initiative is separated into seven programs, including finance, compliance, and risk and controls. While some 13,000 employees are dedicated to the Transformation, much of this work is carried out by employees across the bank.

Selva sits at the center, coordinating these efforts. He's in a tough position, as much of the Transformation's work is executed by employees in other divisions.

"The challenge with the Transformation role is you are accountable yet not responsible," the managing director in the Transformation said. "The role is really coordinating and getting others to do what they need to do, which is very different from running a business where the entire team follows your lead, you own it, you have the ability to actually get them to do this stuff."

When everyone is accountable, effectively no one is, a former senior vice president in the Transformation said. Matters got stuck in bureaucracy, bouncing from one department to another and being debated in committee for months.

A senior executive in the Transformation acknowledged that the programs often rely on each other's work. For example, a delay in data work can lead to one for a finance project.

"When we are asked sometimes why it is challenging to execute on the Transformation, one of the challenges is the interconnectivity of those seven works," she said.

But the Transformation has earned a middling grade from Citi itself. The bank evaluates the initiative's success for the purposes of a bonus program applicable to about 200 senior employees, including Selva. In 2022, an internal committee gave it a score of 94%, citing targets it met, such as submitting remediation plans to regulators.

For 2023, the score sank to 80%, calculated by measuring the timeliness of executing scheduled work, the percentage of work deemed complete by the bank's internal auditors, and a "qualitative consideration of Citi's cultural change" derived from the bank's employee surveys.

Bringing in Ryan, the bank's head of technology and business enablement, to help the bank catch up makes sense. The recruiter Phil Waxelbaum argued that a more traditional candidate to help lead the Transformation would be a seasoned, high-ranking person from a regulatory agency. But someone with a nonbanking background such as consulting or technology can work, too, according to recruiter Jeffrey Warren. Ryan joined Citi in June after seven years leading the US business of PricewaterhouseCoopers.

"In situations like this when you are looking to drive transformation, you need someone who can work at the intersection of people, processes, and technology," said Warren, managing director at Russell Reynolds Associates. "That includes working from within and likely driving some change with new people who have experience in new technologies or new ways of doing things."

Ryan is now sharing data, a significant component of the Transformation, with Selva. Another PwC alum, Citi's head of enterprise risk management, Ashutosh Nawani, will take over the chief data office from one of Selva's lieutenants, Japan Mehta, and report to Ryan. Mehta will move to another role that the bank declined to specify.

Employees told BI that they thought bringing in Ryan and Nawani would help.

"Sure, there might be some reservation that more consultants are coming in to run Citi, but there is a positive vibe of changing senior leadership," the former senior vice president in the Transformation said. "Legacy Citi culture is what got us into this spot in the first place."

The outstanding issues have also impeded Citi from expanding in China. According to Bloomberg, the bank is still waiting on a clearance letter from the Federal Reserve to set up a securities office. The bank declined to comment on the process but said it was "fully committed to supporting clients" in China.

Regulators placing an asset cap on Citi, as Senator Warren has requested, isn't out of the realm of possibility, said Timothy Coffey, an analyst with Janney Montgomery Scott.

"At what point do the regulators just get fed up with Citi's inability to adequately resolve these issues or stick to the timeline that they've laid out?" he said. "That's an open-ended question."

But the consent orders and the lack of progress are distractions in themselves. When Fraser took over Citi nearly four years ago, she said the Transformation was her No. 1 priority and asked for patience. Now her requests for time are wearing thin. Regardless of who leads the Transformation, Fraser is still accountable.

"This stays out here in terms of headline risk, and I think it puts a cap on the valuation that Citi can achieve," said Stephen Biggar, an Argus Research analyst. "It's an overhang on the stock. It's an overhang on the reputation of Fraser."

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