Ida Liu, the global head of Citi’s private bank, is leaving the company at the end of this month, and the bank is eliminating her role, according to a LinkedIn post Monday and a memo seen by Bloomberg.
Rather than have one private-banking chief, Citi will use four regional heads who will report to Andy Sieg, the bank’s head of global wealth.
Steven Lo will lead Citi’s private-banking efforts in Japan, Australia, North Asia and Asia South. Antonio Gonzales will lead Latin America private banking. James Holder will be responsible for private banking in the U.K., Europe and the Middle East. And Cayman Wills will be the interim head of private banking in North America, Citi announced Monday.
“This will enable even closer collaboration with leaders of the products and functions essential to delivering for our clients around the world,” Sieg wrote in Monday’s memo.
The move tracks with Citi’s long-running effort to reduce redundancy and overlapping responsibilities. The bank eliminated five layers of management between September 2023 and March of last year in a wide-scale reorganization that’s ongoing.
Liu, an 18-year veteran at Citi, did not detail the next step in her career.
“Great careers are defined by embracing new challenges and opportunities, and this is the right time for me to leverage my global expertise, leadership experience and passion for growth in bold and exciting new ways,” she wrote on LinkedIn, specifying that the decision to leave Citi was hers.
Sieg, in a separate memo Monday, said Liu “has left an indelible mark across our organization and will be greatly missed.”
It’s not a lock that Liu’s next step will be directly banking-related. She left the sector in 2004 – five years into a stint in investment banking at Merrill Lynch – to become an executive with fashion designer Vivienne Tam, according to her LinkedIn profile.
Liu returned to banking three years later, after she persuaded Citi to launch a fashion, media and entertainment arm within its private bank. Liu then leveraged her fashion contacts to bring wealthy clients to the bank. She launched Citi’s Asian Clients Group in 2011, landing more business for the bank. Citi named her to lead private banking in New York in 2016, then North America in 2019 and globally in 2021, according to LinkedIn.
In Liu, Citi loses a prominent woman executive. Women comprise 17%, or three out of 18 members, of the bank’s executive management committee. That includes CEO Jane Fraser.
Further, much of Liu’s responsibility is being placed in the care of men: Three of the four regional private-banking chiefs are men; Wills, the interim head for North America, is a woman.
Similarly, at least twice recently when women executives of Liu’s stature left Citi, men stood to gain. When Titi Cole, Citi’s reorganization czar, left the bank last May, Citi hired Tim Ryan to lead the legacy franchises Cole oversaw, as part of his duties in technology and business enablement. When Karen Peetz, the bank’s chief administrative officer, retired in May 2023, Citi named Anand Selva as its chief operating officer, placing him in charge of the tech modernization Peetz had previously overseen.
At the wealth-management level, eight out of 17 members of Sieg’s leadership team are women.
Citi announced two other notable changes to its wealth management business Monday. It named Christian Zeinler, a UBS alum, as head of strategy for Citi Wealth and head of business execution for the private bank. Additionally, the private bank's family office group will become aligned with Citi’s integrated client engagement unit, to be led by Dawn Nordberg, who joined Citi in September from Morgan Stanley.
Citi’s private bank is one of three divisions within its wealth-management operations. Under Sieg, the business has emphasized asset management and changed how it pays its private bankers — compensating them for bringing in client assets rather than per transaction.
Fraser, in a quarterly earnings call this month, referred to 2024 as a “turning point for wealth as we sharpened our focus on investments, right-sized the expense base and improved the client experience,” according to the Financial Times.
“This is where we see the big upside,” she said.
Income from Citi’s wealth division more than doubled last year to exceed $1 billion, but that success has also been marked by several senior departures, the publication noted.
"Over the past year, across Citi Wealth, we have refocused our business strategy, simplified our organization and set a new trajectory for growth," Sieg wrote Monday, according to American Banker. "Citi Private Bank will be key to continuing this momentum, with its deep connections to wealthy clients and families."
