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Yahoo
4 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Citi marketing chief looks to ‘reenergize' the bank's brand
This story was originally published on Banking Dive. To receive daily news and insights, subscribe to our free daily Banking Dive newsletter. Following an overhaul of Citi's wealth strategy, the marketing efforts to elevate and grow the business have gotten a refresh, too. Under Chief Marketing and Content Officer Alex Craddock, who joined Citi just over a year ago, the bank has restructured its marketing department to better support its broader vision, and hired for several new marketing roles, including a head of wealth marketing, a head of banking and markets marketing, a head of sponsorships and partnerships, and a head of marketing innovation, he said. New York-based Citi has doubled down on growth in its wealth segment, which had struggled in the past but has become a key piece to improving the bank's business mix by adding more fee-based revenue. Andy Sieg joined Citi in 2023 as head of wealth, and the lender has leaned into improving productivity and taking advantage of its global footprint to expand the business. Craddock pointed to wealth as an area ripe for opportunity when it comes to reinvigorating the bank's brand. With its marketing efforts, Citi aims to think about its brand more holistically and make sure business marketing is aligned with the broader brand strategy, Craddock told Banking Dive last week. Content also falls under Craddock's purview, and the approach there has changed, too. 'We're not just producing content and putting out a 50-page white paper,' he said. 'We're really thinking a lot more strategically' about content format, distribution, and ensuring content creators are working closely with Citi's business units, 'to ensure that we're stitching together the macro thought leadership with very specific content for businesses on how you can act on that thought leadership,' he said. Editor's note: This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity. ALEX CRADDOCK: We unified a fragmented marketing team: Business marketing was embedded in the businesses, enterprise marketing was centralized, and we needed to bring everybody together under me and my new role. We set the vision early on. The vision we aligned around is accelerating Citi's growth by winning the hearts and minds of existing and prospective clients through a distinct, Citi-branded client experience. That came about through a group exercise that we did to narrow down, what is it that we want to set as our North Star for the new team? So much of marketing is an experience. It's not one touch point. It's how you screw together different touch points, and, importantly, how you string those touch points together as a complement to what other partners in the business are doing, like sales, customer service or people in branches. We needed to think about that experience holistically. With Andy Sieg coming in, laying out an exciting vision and an impressive business strategy for wealth, it was evident that if we were going to support that, we needed to unify our wealth marketing under one leader. So we now have a new head of wealth marketing who started recently, Patty Sachs. We see opportunities to reenergize the brand, and wealth is a great example. We recognized, as we were bringing all the individual parts of the wealth business together, we needed to develop a new proposition and a new brand platform to launch that proposition to market. So we reposition wealth in the minds of our clients and ensure that it meets the business that we are today, and not some perception of who we were in the past. We did a lot of work when I came in through last year, to really understand our clients' needs, understand our landscape and identify a client audience that is the right kind for Citi to go after, and build a proposition and a platform to reach them. What we've called the world's change-makers. When you look at what exists today, a lot of wealth is around wealth preservation or a focus on retirement. The world change-maker audience is focused on wealth creation, and often multigenerational wealth creation. They're often international in the way they live their lives, but also in business. Given our unique global footprint – 180 markets around the world – we are probably best-suited to serve a client of that type. It's thinking about marketing as much more of a strategic business driver and growth accelerator than it has been in the past, which was very much about events and loyalty to existing clients. That's a really important pillar, but I think there were many pillars around that that we weren't activating. We didn't do an awful lot in paid media, our email marketing probably wasn't as sophisticated, or we weren't thinking about cross-sell. That's where a much more data-driven approach to marketing is important. We've identified wealth as a business but also a subbrand – that's a big difference. Before, wealth was fragmented: there was Citi Private Bank, we had Citigold and Citigold Private Client, and we had Citi Global Wealth at Work. But we never really thought about the three together. We never thought about that continuum of wealth and how we can align our wealth businesses around this new target audience we've identified. Also, making sure that through the marketing, we're telling the story. The great work that's been done to redesign our wealth business, redesign our product and solution offering – that's a story that needs to be told to existing clients, but also prospective clients, so we're positioning wealth the right way relative to our peer set around the world. We're focused on three key priorities. One is around content creation, and how we can start to accelerate creation of written and visual content. The other is around personalization: how can we use AI to personalize content, whether that's for specific client segments, or how we personalize, for example, our credit card marketing real-time? That can be accelerated with [artificial intelligence]. The third is around validation. We are producing a vast amount of content across the firm. It's hard for humans to make sure it is all on-brand. We can use AI to do that validation and make recommendations as to how we might want to augment certain aspects of our content to make sure that it is consistent with brand guidelines. The other part we're exploring is compliance approvals: how do we accelerate the speed at which we are getting compliance approval for content, by using AI to do a lot of that heavy lifting for us? As a firm, we've invested a lot in AI platforms, large language models. We have some desktop tools that we're using that are helping us draft content, summarize content. What we are exploring in marketing is, how can we build agents on top of large language models to help us do some of those jobs? We're building the expertise and knowledge in-house, but we're complementing that with third-party AI solutions where it makes sense, because they bring something distinctive that we couldn't build ourselves, or it would take too long to build. I keep encouraging the team to think about our AI in marketing as human-plus-AI is always going to be greater in the future than just a human or just AI. That helps eliminate some of the fear that inherently gets driven by AI, but also excites people around the opportunity. Errore nel recupero dei dati Effettua l'accesso per consultare il tuo portafoglio Errore nel recupero dei dati Errore nel recupero dei dati Errore nel recupero dei dati Errore nel recupero dei dati
Yahoo
06-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Why Citi's head of wealth isn't sold on the stock market rally
SANTA MONICA, Calif. — Toss a bucket of cold water on the stock market rally. "We remain cautious in terms of where to deploy incremental risk assets. Our message has not been to liquidate your portfolio and go to cash. Our message has been, right now, there's great uncertainty. We've seen soft data but not a lot of hard data yet," Citi head of wealth Andy Sieg told Yahoo Finance at the Milken Institute Global Conference on Tuesday. Sieg noted that there have been "as many downward [earnings] revisions as we've seen in a long, long time." His team is looking for additional information before taking on more risk assets. "We generally think the market's going to remain in a trading range here over the next few months until some of these things become more visible," he added. Sieg oversees a global wealth business at Citi with more than $1 trillion in client assets and 13,000 employees. Strong first quarter earnings reports from Meta (META), Alphabet (GOOGL), and Microsoft (MSFT) in the past two weeks have powered the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite (^IXIC) to a 13.5% gain over the past month. That's despite the likes of Apple (AAPL) warning that the Trump tariffs would hit its cost base to the tune of $900 million. On Monday, the S&P 500 snapped a nine-day winning streak. It marked the longest winning streak for stocks dating back to 2004. The Dow Jones Industrial Average (^DJI) also ended a nine-day winning streak, its best since 2023. All three major indexes are in the negative for the year, however, with the Nasdaq leading with an 8.5% drop. "I think there's two reasons for [the rally]," Nuveen chief investment officer Saira Malik told Yahoo Finance at the Milken Institute Global Conference. "No. 1, when markets tend to go down quickly, they actually recover quickly. So history did repeat itself. And No. 2, I think 'Liberation Day' was peak tariff pain, and we've seen a lot of negotiating since then, and I think markets are starting to appreciate that." Citi head of wealth Andy Sieg (right) talks with Yahoo Finance Executive Editor Brian Sozzi (left) at the 2025 Milken Institute Global Conference about the path forward for stocks after a recent strong rally. · Yahoo Finance As for Sieg's wealth business at Citi, it's coming off a strong first quarter thanks to a strong market prior to April's "Liberation Day." The division posted revenue of $2.1 billion, leading to a 30% gain in net interest income. Client investment assets were aided by $16.5 billion in net new investment assets, bringing the total to $595 billion. Operating expenses were flat year over year. Whether Sieg can keep the momentum going amid heightened market volatility is up for debate. The backdrop is such that wealthy investors may think twice before allocating more funds to private and public markets.
Yahoo
06-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Investors are still excited about the US, Citi's Andy Sieg says
Citi Head of Wealth Andy Sieg joins Yahoo Finance executive editor Brian Sozzi at the Milken Institute's 2025 Global Conference for a conversation about the scope of Citi's business and client base around the world, the asset manager's perspective on investing in the US amid global trade and economic headlines, whether he is optimistic on market trends, and, lastly, touches upon President Trump's plans for a US sovereign wealth fund. To watch more expert insights and analysis on the latest market action, check out more Market Domination here.
Yahoo
17-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Citi wealth says 'strategy is working' as net new assets surge
Citi executives said its wealth division is making "excellent progress" under Andy Sieg, the firm's head of wealth. The division reported a 489% surge in its new investment assets in the fourth quarter. Citi reported $16.5 billion in net new investment assets for the last quarter of 2024. That metric, which evaluates wealth managers' performance independently of market fluctuations, contributed to a 24% increase in revenue for the megabank's wealth division, reaching $2.1 billion (excluding interest expenses). Citi began reporting net new investment assets in the fourth quarter 2024, citing it as part of a "strategic priority for the Wealth business to accelerate growth in Client Investment Assets and the associated investment revenue," according to a footnote in its quarterly earnings presentation. That metric includes dividends and interest payments but excludes market gains, fees and commissions. READ MORE: LPL accuses Ameriprise of defamation over data breach notices The wealth division reported an organic growth rate of 11% over the last 12 months, which it defines as the sum of net new investment assets for each quarter from the second quarter of 2024 through the first quarter 2025, divided by client investment assets from the first quarter of 2024. In a call with analysts Wednesday, Citi CEO Jane Fraser said the wealth division has "real horsepower and firepower in our investment capabilities" thanks to investments in improved client experiences and technology at the firm. Last year, Fraser said during a second-quarter earnings call that the company is working to address "decades of underinvestment" in Citi's infrastructure. Speaking at Bank of America's Securities Financial Services Conference in February, Sieg said that technology in Citi's wealth division has been a "limiting factor." READ MORE: Edward Jones revives bank plans in bid to boost services — and revenue "The Citi-wide focus on topics like data and our overall technology architecture ... creates a tailwind for us, which is a good starting point," Sieg said. "We've got partners like Palantir and Google and Snowflake around our cloud architecture that are putting us in position to make progress, we think, in months, which once in my career would have been years of progress to move the platforms forward." Despite the firm's renewed interest in improving its technology infrastructure, the wealth division reported lower technology expenses overall in the first quarter. Tech savings, along with cost-cutting measures, weren't enough to offset increased costs from higher revenue-related expenses and higher severance offerings. Citi's wealth division reported $1.64 billion in total operating expenses, up 5% from the previous quarter. The firm is off to a strong start in the first quarter of this year, with $2.1 billion in revenue yielding $284 million in net income. That was up 62% over the same period last year. A significant portion of the firm's revenue growth stemmed from its Citigold unit, which serves clients with $200,000 or more in assets. Last year, Citi introduced a recruitment strategy targeting advisors who generate $1 million to $2 million in annual revenue, offering them upfront and deferred loans equivalent to 100% to 250% of their production. Citigold posted a 24% year-over-year revenue increase, reaching just over $1.16 billion in the first quarter. The firm's private bank, focused on serving high-net-worth clients, saw its revenue grow 16% year over year to $664 million. Meanwhile, the Wealth at Work unit, which caters to law firms and other professionals, also delivered strong results with a 48% year-over-year revenue jump to $268 million. READ MORE: Following strong Q1, Wells Fargo preps for 'slower economic environment' Across Citi's wealth units, the firm reported making $646 million of its total revenue from commissions and other fees, up 14% year over year. It also reported nearly $1.3 billion in net interest income, up 30% from the same period last year. "In this environment, around the world, clients are really looking to us for advice because there are not many global wealth managers," Fraser said during Citi's earnings call. "So we are a destination of choice right now, and we're taking full advantage of it. I don't see that changing. This is the strength of Citi. The strategy is working." Sign in to access your portfolio
