‘Having a “human” bank is very important’: A conversation with Citi CEO Jane Fraser

After becoming CEO in March 2021, Jane Fraser launched a multiyear strategy to transform, simplify, and modernize Citigroup for the digital age. That’s an enormous challenge for a bank with a presence in 180 countries. The result is a trim company on a single platform that has left certain legacy businesses and entered new ones. In this conversation with McKinsey’s Eric Kutcher, Fraser talks about the transformation, the role of AI and blockchain technologies, and the state of the global economy. What follows is an edited transcript of that conversation.

Eric Kutcher: As I often say, we live in interesting times. Given you are probably one of the most global CEOs in the world, and certainly in the banking industry, as you travel the world, what are the trends you’re seeing?

Jane Fraser: Something that has really been reinforced for me this year is the mindset that different countries and companies have—and who’s on the front foot and who’s not. You could almost divide the world into the countries and companies that are building what they need with a view to the future, and those that are more focused on protecting what they already have. Broadly, I think of Europe as being in quite a “protect what we have” mindset, whereas the US, China, and the Middle East are very much in a “build what we need for the future” mindset. Another difference I see is regarding whether growth is a team sport or a tug-of-war. If you go, say, to the Middle East—I find this exciting in Saudi Arabia or Abu Dhabi—there is this sense that the whole of the team is playing each of their individual sports, but they’re driving the same agenda. Whereas in other countries, it’s either a tug-of-war or the entire team is standing in front of the goal, playing defense.

And then you’ve got all these shifting geopolitics, which are changing flows of technology, finance, energy, and the like. Economics is favoring the scale players, so there is also this race for scale. It’s a fascinating time, but at the end of the day, it’s important to make sure you’re relevant for what the world is going to be in a few years’ time.

Eric Kutcher: You would also have one of the greatest views of how economies feel across the world. How do you see overall economic movement, and what keeps you up at night?

Jane Fraser: The world has been remarkably resilient. Between COVID, conflicts, and then the policy changes, the speed of adaptation has been remarkable. A lot of large companies have been able to navigate this incredibly well without it being highly detrimental because they’ve got diversity. I think the ones who’ve paid a heavier price have been the smaller companies—the fourth-tier suppliers or smaller retailers—who don’t have the diversity or adaptability.

One of the things we’re keeping an eye on is the fiscal situation of many countries. You’ve got almost “emerging-market-like” risks being applied to developed markets. In an emerging market, there are more constraints, whereas in a developed market, things can become systemic and problematic for everyone—quickly. Fiscal dominance and the intertwining of monetary and fiscal policy is one of the big long-term economic watch items. Affordability’s another one you’ve got to keep an eye on. It’s a lot more expensive today—for a lot more people—to have a good quality of life. That can come through in housing, dissatisfaction with standards of living, and ultimately in how people vote. I think affordability will bite different countries at different points.

Otherwise, in the shorter term, there’s probably another shoe to drop in tariffs; the labor market has held up well, but it’s showing some signs of softening; asset prices are high at the moment, and there’s a lot of money flowing around in some concentrated opportunities. As a bank, one is always mindful of cyber and geopolitical threats disrupting the payments network, security network, infrastructure, or other elements. We’ve got a lot of heightened risks there. We can work our way through them, but they’re certainly not fun when they happen. So overall, it’s seat belts on for 2026.

Eric Kutcher: Can you give us a sense of the magnitude of change you’ve been driving at Citi in your time as CEO? What have you been doing—strategically, around where you compete, and operationally, around how you compete?

Jane Fraser: We were all things to all people everywhere, and that’s not a viable business model for where the modern world and economies are heading. We decided we would focus on where we felt we had a distinctive competitive advantage and eliminate where we didn’t. We’re a bank that does business in 180 countries, operating as a local bank in almost 100—and have done so for a century in many of these markets. That is our source of differentiation, and our people are unique in their global mindset. For me, the clarity was that we really had to drive toward modern excellence as the preeminent partner for clients who had cross-border needs—to tap into global investment markets, global capital markets, global supply chains, and so on—and that we would be the bank that provides the modern infrastructure to support those clients.

The heart of the strategy revolves around what we call our services business, which is really supporting the working capital of clients. We move $2,000 trillion a year, with 6,000 multinationals around the world. We do that in a digitized, now increasingly blockchain, multidimensional network. So that’s quite a remarkable capability; it’s the leading one in the world, and we’re constantly innovating. Linked to this are our trading businesses, which support these clients. If you think of multinational companies, they have to hedge foreign exchange, interest rates, commodities; they need to do capital raising in different countries across all those dimensions, and that’s the banking business. Then we help entrepreneurs—the world’s progress makers and changemakers; we’re the wealth manager of these entrepreneurs, business leaders, and owners.

It’s a singular client base, and we sold all our local businesses and focused on those that could operate on global platforms. That enabled us to radically simplify the entire organization’s structure. We took out four layers of the company. We took out the local complexity from how we manage businesses; because they’re now run on global platforms, we don’t need to do a country plan every single year for every geography. We standardized everything onto a single platform, with single processes everywhere around the world. Now we can run the bank almost on a grid, looking at the same data across and down the bank.

That’s what we’ve spent the last five years doing, and now we’ve got a bank that is very much on the front foot and clear about the strategy and direction: We help clients operate globally, help them grow, help them with the financing, the structuring, and the other elements around it. Instead of being all things to all people, we’re all things that are needed for a multinational company to grow and prosper, and we provide the same for the individuals behind those organizations.

Eric Kutcher: You mentioned blockchain. Can you give an example of where you’re using this as part of the digitization strategy?

Jane Fraser: When I think about the future of the payments network, I get very excited about tokenization. With coin, you have tax, you have accounting, you have AML [anti–money laundering], you have all these other complexities to deal with, let alone the on-off ramp, which is a 7 percent transaction cost. And with coin, it’s very hard for a country to control its capital account because of FX [foreign exchange] controls.

I think tokenization of markets is the future. We’ve just linked our 24/7 clearing to our tokenized capabilities. So now we can move money from your bank account with us in New York to London, and then to your HSBC account in London or your Lloyds Bank account in London, all instantly. That’s really the use case—multimarket, multicurrency, always on, instantaneous. You want it to be safe, and you don’t want any complexity. This is where tokenization in the chain is very valuable, because we can do this within the existing banking system. So that’s tokenization; it’ll be coming to equity markets, it’ll be coming to oil, it’ll be coming to multiple different areas, and it’s nice and secure.

Eric Kutcher: There seems to be a prevailing incongruence where many CEOs I speak to insist that the layoffs we are starting to see have nothing to do with AI, while others might suggest otherwise. What are you seeing, and what is your expectation of the way AI will change the labor market?

Jane Fraser: What we’ve seen so far is the enormous build-out of AI infrastructure, and that has certainly been helping boost economic growth. But when we look at AI itself, it has not really come through yet. We’re only in year three of this huge AI shift, so I don’t think we should be falling off our chairs because the big productivity benefits haven’t come through yet. What we’re seeing with AI right now is more bottom up, task oriented. At Citi, we’ve given our employees a lot of different AI tools, and they’re augmenting productivity. Our AI usage is high, at about 70 percent, but that’s helping people do their jobs and removing some of the drudgery elements. The productivity benefits come from scaled use cases applied top down.

We’re systematically going through all our major processes. I use a dishwasher analogy: How you wash a dish by hand and how a dishwasher washes a dish are completely different. How the two processes work has almost nothing to do with each other. We’re looking at AI and applying it to our processes like a dishwasher, as opposed to only thinking about how to better automate the manual process. And that is starting to deliver some staggering productivity numbers, particularly with agentic AI. Our coders today are 9 percent more productive in their entirety—that’s 30,000 coders—than they were at the beginning of the year. So I know the agentic piece, where you’re getting agents to act and work together, will be a game changer for some business models. You can see this happening, and you can also see new jobs and the shifting of roles. But what will the timing of this be? Will they happen together? I think we’re in for a bit of a bumpy ride on the productivity operational side.

The other element is the risks. We all talk about what AI means from the operational side, what it’s doing for customer service, or coding, and so on. From a cyber perspective, as a bank, we have many billions of attacks on us a day—authentication, fraud, money laundering, cyber. It’s a scary combo that keeps me awake at night. So while there are new elements and new threats, there are new jobs there, too. It’s going to be a very different world.

Eric Kutcher: People talk about your willingness to bring in external talent, which, in my experience, is something few CEOs do, at least with great success. How do you think about doing that?

Jane Fraser: We have fantastic talent inside the bank, and sometimes it’s hard bringing external talent into your management team in a company that’s as old as ours. But to my mind, it was an imperative, so we just went about finding the best talent. If you’re trying to build something new, you can often get people who are the best in the world at something, because they’re starting to get bored where they are—they want to build again and demonstrate that they can shape more than one legacy. We were able to bring a couple of fantastic leaders from competitors that were much bigger and say, “OK, you are now going to build the leading franchise again, but you’re going to do it in a modern way, fitting with our assets, for the next generation.” It’s surprisingly easy to bring great teams and talent together when you’re building something. It’s sometimes harder to retain talent when you’re at the pinnacle; people don’t really want to just tweak things that are already optimized. People like growing and building things, so tap into that.

Eric Kutcher: You’re now well through this window of transformation, and you have a lot of opportunity ahead. How do you balance thinking about the short term with the long term? And as CEO, how do you manage all those different people coming at you from all sides?

Jane Fraser: I have what I call my quarterly intent: What is it this quarter that I need to do? And how does this year fit into what’s coming up? I’m about to sit down with my board and lay out 2026. We want to deliver certain financial targets, so I call that a “waypoint” year, but it’s also the foundational year for the firm’s next chapter, and we’ll talk about the different foundations we want to lay down. As long as you can keep that big picture view—with enough flexibility to pivot when the world turns out very differently from what you expected—you will still know your core intent for that year, and your core intent for that quarter. And you make sure you are achieving as much 80:20 on it as possible. I think then, when people understand that is the direction and they know what they’ve got to do, it’s easier to manage the stakeholders.

That was the biggest surprise I had as CEO—how much stakeholder management your job involves. There’s a real shock factor to just how many of them only you as CEO can deal with, at least until you’ve got the team established. It’s a lot of work. I think empathy is important. It’s by far the most effective way to win business with a client—it’s not about what you want to sell them; it’s about what they need and how you meet that need. Often, it’s not the way you are thinking about dealing with stakeholders, but when you do put yourself in their shoes, you’ll come at things very differently. My coach taught me, “You’ve got to deal with them with empathy. What is it they’re fearful of? What are they concerned about?” So I think empathy helps you understand how to get to a win–win, and it can save you quite a bit of agony.

Eric Kutcher: If you could wind the clock back to when you took the role as CEO, what do you wish you had known then that you know now? What key thing would you call out to others as they head into roles like this?

Jane Fraser: The job is extraordinary, but it’s relentless. Everything is coming at you the entire time, and it just doesn’t stop. So you do need to have incredible emotional resilience. You stick with the plan, and if you need to adapt the plan, you need to do so with real grit and determination. You can’t let the media, the chitchat, the noise around you get in the way of getting your job done. One of my board members told me, “You need two things as a CEO: big ears and thick skin.” And you have to really build those listening skills, because people will often tell you what they think you want to hear. So you need better sources of truth and other elements of input. You also need courage, physical strength, and good health because, again, it’s always on. But I think that emotional resiliency was something I had really underestimated, and I don’t think there’s a good enough job done in helping leaders build that.

Eric Kutcher: How do you think about what kind of legacy you want to leave Citi?

Jane Fraser: As we’ve gone through all this lift, I’ve always said I can’t wait to run the bank that we’re building. I would hope the legacy is having success with both the way the bank operates and the capabilities we’ve got, as well as in the talent pyramid and the culture. That is a human bank. I think the bank with a brain is table stakes, but having a human bank is very important. It’s a great gift you have as a CEO—this ability to make people feel good and celebrate them when they’ve had success. The relationships, the human dimensions, are to be nurtured and invested in.

And the other thing, obviously, is global dominance.