Citi’s 5-year comeback: How CEO Jane Fraser turned the bank’s chronic underperformance into decade-high revenue

It was March 2022, Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser was a year and a day into her job. She was the first woman ever to lead a major U.S. bank. And Citi was in a bad spot: Its stock had dropped 15% during her tenure, lagging behind the S&P 500’s 10% growth. It was the only big U.S. bank trading below its book value. There also had been a humiliating blunder in which the bank sent $900 million to the wrong place and struggled to get it back.

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.

Unfazed, Fraser ticked through her recovery plan with the ruthless precision of a seasoned McKinsey consultant (she’s an alum). Her vision for Citi: to be the preeminent banking partner for institutions with cross-border needs; a global leader in wealth management; and a valued personal bank in our home market. Anything that didn’t serve these purposes may end up on the chopping block. And the bank’s culture of mediocrity had to change: “Good enough was good enough for far too long,” she said.

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 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 the writer when we spoke again this April: “I think you can make tough decisions. It does not mean you need to be an asshole.”

Five years into her tenure, the grades for Fraser’s turnaround plan are in: The new Citi is very much here. In April, Citi logged its highest quarterly revenue in a decade, with all five of its divisions recording gains, led by services and markets. The bank’s return on tangible common equity hit 13.1% in the first quarter, the highest since 2021. Citi stock is up about 83% since Fraser took over as CEO. It has risen 7.8% this year, ahead of rivals JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America, but slightly behind the S&P 500’s 8% growth. And it has largely addressed regulatory reporting issues, and shed management layers and bureaucracy.

“Turnaround” can be a loaded term when it comes to female leaders. The well-documented glass-cliff phenomenon—in which boards turn to women when the cleanup job is exceedingly difficult or impossible—can be a trap for female execs who accept a no-win challenge.

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.

Lately, Fraser has used pointed language to signal a cultural reset. In 2023, she urged employees who weren’t on board with her overhaul to “get off the train.” In January, Fraser told her 226,000 staffers that she would no longer be grading them with A’s for effort; they would be judged on results. “I expect to see the last vestiges of old, bad habits fall away, and a more disciplined, more confident, winning Citi fully emerge in 2026,” she wrote.

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