Macaskill on Markets: Is it time for a new president (at Citi)?
Jon Macaskill
Citigroup chief executive Jane Fraser manages a team of rivals who might aspire to her job. Competition is healthy but appointing a new president as a deputy could help Fraser deliver the next phase of her growth plan.
Titles at banks can mean just what managers choose them to mean. The biggest Wall Street firms each employ more than 10,000 vice-presidents, for example, doing the grunt work they hope will lead to promotion to director and then managing director.
President, by contrast, is a title that is unambiguously senior. It normally refers to the number two position under the chief executive, though it can be a shared role.
Fraser was appointed president of Citi in 2019 on the way to becoming chief executive in 2021. Fraser only added the title of chair of the board in October so it is understandable that she is in no rush to anoint a successor, and an insider at Citi said there are no current plans to appoint a president.
Citi’s investor day on May 7 is likely to ignite succession speculation, nevertheless. It will be the bank’s first full-blown investor day since 2022, though there was a pitch to shareholders in 2024 designed to raise the profile of Citi’s services division.
Fraser will be joined in outlining a vision for the future by a management team that is finally all her own, including recently appointed chief financial officer Gonzalo Luchetti.
The focus will be on the leaders of Citi’s four main business lines – banking, markets, services and wealth management.
Raghavan under scrutiny
Banking head Vis Raghavan is likely to come under the closest scrutiny. Raghavan was hired in 2024 from JP Morgan to revive Citi’s investment banking franchise, which was the lowest ranked of the five Wall Street firms that have dominated earnings since the global financial crisis in 2008. Citi was behind not just the investment banking big three of JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, but also Bank of America.
Raghavan was given the additional role of executive vice-chair, which is another title that can evade easy definition.
Executive vice-chairman roles have been deployed for decades as a sop for senior managers who are being eased out of major business responsibility, to avoid the insult of an abrupt ejection.
In March this year, when Mark Mason stepped down as chief financial officer at Citi, he was given the title of executive vice-chair and the bank said he would work with Fraser “on some of the firm’s most important strategic initiatives, drawing on more than two decades of leadership, financial expertise and operational experience at Citi”. He is expected to leave the bank later this year and hopes to become chief executive at another firm.
Raghavan was given the executive vice-chair title when he arrived at Citi, which is unusual.
That might indicate that he is in pole position to take the role of president, as it distinguishes him from fellow business leaders like markets head Andy Morton and wealth head Andy Sieg.
League table struggles
But first Raghavan will have to deliver on his core task of meeting Citi’s investment banking goals, and that is proving far from easy.
When Raghavan joined in June 2024, Citi ranked fifth for overall investment banking fees for the first half of the year, with a 3.91% market share, according to LSEG data. Citi made decent progress in 2025, winning a market share of 4.13% for the whole year, but this year it has gone backwards with a share of the global fee wallet down to 3.65% as of March 31 – below the share when Raghavan joined.
In bonds, a longstanding strength for Citi, the bank has gone from a number three ranking when Raghavan arrived to number five this year to date.
Citi’s share of the overall wallet for bond fees has fallen from 4.21% to 3.82%. In equity capital markets, where Raghavan started his career, Citi has dropped from the number five ranking when he arrived to number six now – with its wallet share falling from 5.21% in mid-2024 to 3.77% this year.
M&A is the highest profile investment banking sector and has been a focus of hiring by Raghavan.
This push seemed promising at first. When Raghavan arrived, Citi’s M&A ranking for the first half of 2024 was number eight – below boutique advisory firms Lazard, Centerview Partners and Evercore, as well as Citi’s peers in the overall top five.
In 2025 the bank moved up the M&A rankings to the number four slot, above Bank of America, as well as the leading boutiques. There was also a substantial increase in fee share, from 3.19% when Raghavan arrived to 4.89% in 2025, a year that saw more than US$2bn of M&A revenue booked.
But the first quarter of this year has marked another reverse. Citi had slipped back to a number seven ranking by March 31, with just US$329m of fees for a 3.15% wallet share.
There is plenty of time to recover this year in all sectors, but if Raghavan cannot demonstrate consistent momentum soon, perhaps Citi should appoint Morton as president.
His markets division was ranked joint third for global revenue last year and second behind only JP Morgan in fixed income, the biggest trading segment. Morton is also older than his peers at Citi – and Fraser – so his appointment as president could signal that the chief executive has a deputy who could take over in an emergency but does not have long-term aspirations to her job. That in turn could encourage other group heads to focus on their core functions.