Dive Brief:
- Citi paid CEO Jane Fraser $22.5 million for 2021, the bank revealed in a filing Monday.
- While her compensation ranks well below industry leaders — the CEOs of Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs each made $35 million last year — the package represents a 31.2% raise over the $17.15 million Fraser made as Citi’s second-highest-ranking executive in 2020, according to The Wall Street Journal. The pay bump is also in line with the nearly 31% raise Bank of America gave CEO Brian Moynihan in 2021.
- Fraser’s $22.5 million for 2021 is also 18.2% more than the $19 million Citi paid its previous CEO, Michael Corbat, in 2020. Corbat’s compensation saw a 20.7% dip in his final full year as chief executive, as Citi took a $400 million fine from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) over persistent risk management, data governance and internal control issues. Corbat earned $24 million in 2018 and 2019.
Dive Insight:
Fraser’s compensation breaks down to a $1.33 million annual salary, a $6.35 million cash incentive, $4.23 million in deferred stock that vests over four years and $10.58 million in performance share units (PSUs).
The PSUs’ value varies based on the bank’s return on tangible common equity and tangible book value per share over three years. Half of Fraser’s non-base-pay compensation derives from the PSUs. That’s up from 35% last year.
Her $1.33 million salary represents 10 months at Citi’s usual CEO pay rate of $1.5 million per year because Fraser took over the bank’s top role March 1, the bank said.
Much of the attention surrounding Fraser’s pay may stem from her gender. She is the first woman to lead a U.S.-based Wall Street bank, and Citi — long before Fraser’s ascent — positioned itself as a market leader on gender equality. Citi in 2018 chose to reveal raw pay gap data, becoming the first U.S. bank of its size to do so, and it typically posts yearly updates on its progress narrowing the wage gap.
Female employees at the bank made 26% less than male employees as of January 2021, Sara Wechter, Citi's head of human resources, wrote in a blog post. That's down from 29% in the first year Citi reported the figures. However, women make 99% of what men do when they're given the same titles and have similar levels of experience, Citi said. To narrow the gap in the raw data, the bank has embarked on an effort to level up — to at least 40% — the proportion of women in its assistant vice president through managing director roles.
In its filing Monday, Citi's compensation committee lauded Fraser's quick work in setting priorities for the bank. On her first day as CEO, she pledged that the bank would achieve net-zero greenhouse-gas emissions in its financing activities by 2050. She also set in motion a strategy last April to withdraw from 13 retail banking markets in the Eastern Hemisphere — and later added Mexico to that list.
On that front, Axis Bank has emerged as the front-runner to acquire Citi's consumer-banking footprint in India in a deal that could be worth $2.5 billion, according to Bloomberg. That would leave China, Russia, Poland and Bahrain — as well as Mexico — as the markets from which Citi has yet to determine an exit plan.
In Fraser's first year as CEO, the bank also submitted plans to the OCC and the Federal Reserve to address how to resolve its 2020 consent orders.
