To make matters worse, just hours before Fraser strode onstage for the bank’s first investor day in five years, Citi had suffered another indignity: Two executives had caught COVID, and the entire event had gone virtual. Fraser was forced to deliver her remarks into a camera, eyes trained on a teleprompter in the largely empty auditorium.
“We have an urgent need to address the issues that have kept our firm from living up to its full potential,” she said, then spoke bluntly: “It’s frankly not a surprise that we’ve been outperformed by our peers and that we failed to meet the expectations of our investors.” She vowed to change how the bank was run, instilling crisp decision-making and real discipline on execution and delivering results.
Fraser’s no-nonsense strategy for Citi was a demonstration of the new kind of leadership she was bringing to Wall Street: historical by definition and displaying a vulnerability that bucked the stoic boys’ club culture that had always dominated banking. Here was a CEO who, when I profiled her after her appointment was announced in 2020, talked about empathy, balance, and her desire for a personal and family life—alongside results; one who wore a fuchsia scarf to match her suit. As she told me when we spoke again this April: “I think you can make tough decisions. It does not mean you need to be an asshole.”
Fraser’s CEO appointment looked at first as though it largely fit that script, but then she flipped it: If she faced any sort of metaphorical precipice, she looks likely to stick the landing.
But the very metrics that vindicate Fraser’s turnaround also raise the stakes for what comes next. Cleaning up a sprawling bank is one job; growing one is another. She now faces the question dogging every CEO who inherits a fixer-upper: Can she shift Citi out of repair mode and into a genuine growth story—one that helps Wall Street believe Citi can lead again?
Citi’s investors had reason to be skeptical in 2022; they had heard promises of turnarounds before. For decades, Citi had tried and failed to shed its reputation as Wall Street’s slacker bank that had long trailed rivals in profitability. The board had tasked Fraser, a Citi veteran with a track record of reviving troubled divisions, with streamlining the bank, which had still not fully dismantled the unwieldy and lumbering financial supermarket former CEO Sandy Weill had bolted together in an ill-advised acquisition spree.
Fraser’s blueprint was classic consultant-style triage—divest the sideshow businesses, simplify the org chart, and redirect capital to the divisions that could actually win. Early on, she funneled Citi’s varied operations into five distinct business lines, flattened its management structure, and began exiting retail banking in 14 international markets. It’s now more specialty grocer than sprawling supermarket.
Now, Mayo says, “there’s nowhere to hide.”
Citi director Peter Blair Henry likes to compare Fraser to an elite athlete. He’s an ex-Division I wide receiver himself, and in his telling, the 58-year-old Scottish-born Brit and University of Cambridge graduate is either an NFL quarterback vowing that a 1–16 team will make it to the next Super Bowl, or famed Boston Celtic Bill Russell, a legendary player-coach, who could draw up a final play and sink the winning shot. “Champions,” he says, “believe they’re going to win. But then they do the work. She’s done the work, and she’s been in the trenches.”
She has indeed: Fraser’s most formative assignment came during the 2008 financial crisis when, as Citi’s global head of strategy and M&A, Fraser executed 25 deals in 18 months to shrink the bank in exchange for much-needed capital. During that period, the bank sold nearly a trillion dollars worth of assets and cut 100,000 jobs.
83%
$215 billion
Fraser’s McKinsey training gave her the know-how to structure a turnaround campaign; the financial crisis experience gave her the fortitude to pull it off.
“So many of the things we were selling we were not the right owner of,” she recalls. “That gave me not only the courage to make tougher decisions but also utter determination that the bank would just be run differently, with discipline, with accountability and focus.”
Some of Fraser’s big-name hires have also come under fire, with allegations of bullying leveled at Citi wealth chief Andy Sieg, whom Fraser recruited from Bank of America, and head of banking Viswas Raghavan, who was reportedly accused of bullying at his previous employer, J.P. Morgan. A former managing director accused Sieg of harassment in a lawsuit filed in January. (Citi has said the lawsuit has no merit and, after an investigation into complaints against Sieg, Citi stood by him. The bank also defended Raghavan as “a proven leader with a well-earned track record for driving results.”)
At times Fraser’s revamping of Citi’s culture has seemed to clash with her efforts to lead what she has called a “human bank.”
That language is in stark contrast with the notes of empathy that she hit around the time she was named CEO. She was candid then about the demands of parenthood — mentioning that she worked part-time for her entire McKinsey partnership, for example. And she framed her willingness to discuss the personal side of the job—and relate to her team on that level—as an edge she possesses based partly on gender norms. “I can be more vulnerable in certain areas,” she told me in an interview at the time, “talking more about the human dimensions of this than some of my male colleagues are comfortable [with].”
It would be easy to assume Fraser traded that human touch for gritty pragmatism once she faced the demands of the CEO hot seat. But Fraser has always maintained that both traits can coexist. “Empathy is not being nice,” she said in an interview at the Stanford Graduate School of Business in February. “It’s just being thoughtful about the other side of the table.”
Still, it’s not easy to be a fixer who’s also an outlier. Fraser remains the sole woman leading a major bank. “Nobody’s going to love you for everything that you do,” says Melissa Fisher, a cultural anthropologist and author of Wall Street Women. “She’s doing it for a business and for economic reasons, like probably any CEO is in that position, but because she’s the first female to do it, I think she’s being held to a higher standard.”
Fraser acknowledges that her job requires some code-switching: “There are messages that are appropriate for different times, but it’s still authentic, it’s coming from me,” she says. “I know who I am,” she adds. “Maybe it’s the benefit of there not being as many female leaders around, you know? You have to have a strong sense of self.”
Close colleagues and associates say Fraser is a thoughtful ally and reliable friend.
Fraser is also known as a prankster. She once pulled an April Fools joke in which she persuaded her senior management team to sign waivers for a fictional group skydiving outing.
Fraser says the purpose of her jokes is simple: “Don’t take yourself too seriously.” She notes dryly that her team has not yet pranked her back: “They don’t dare while I’m in this job.”
Ahead of Citi’s investor day this year, on May 7, analysts had framed the event as yet another inflection point for Citi—but this time it wasn’t about a turnaround. Instead, the questions were focused on whether Citi could transition its strategy from fix-it mode to growth.
But the mood in the room at Citi’s Tribeca headquarters was more subdued than expected. Citi had underwhelmed investors hours earlier when it published modest medium-term profitability targets of 14% to 15% return on tangible common equity by 2031. Citi’s stock dropped in premarket trading.
So when Fraser strode onstage, again in a vibrant pink suit, she was in the familiar position of having to sell investors on her plan. This time, at least, she played to a full house.
Citi’s five distinct business units will generate a flywheel effect for clients that would serve each one’s bottom line and fuel higher returns and stronger growth bank-wide, she said. “A client can have their global cash managed by services, currency hedge by markets, a strategic acquisition advised on and financed by banking, and the personal wealth of its executives managed by the private bank, with their spending supported by cards.”
Citi is also investing in AI to increase efficiency. AI-assisted code reviews have already freed up 100,000 hours of capacity per week on Citi’s engineering team, Fraser said.
By the afternoon, Fraser had, once again, won investors over, with shares closing up 1.2% for the day.
The one person Fraser never had to convince about the validity of her turnaround was herself. Years ago, Fraser talked to me about moments of self-doubt; how, for instance, she initially thought she wasn’t good enough for the role of global head of strategy and M&A when it was offered to her.
But the best cure for self-doubt is doing the hard work. “I went out and listened,” Fraser said, to Citi’s people — investors, clients, regulators, and board.
“Some of that’s uncomfortable. [But] that gave me real confidence in the vision we had to be the preeminent bank for clients with cross-border needs,” she said. “I never had a lack of conviction. This was the right path.”
