Ongoing efforts to modernize Citi’s technology put the bank in a position to “leapfrog” competitors the lender has fallen behind, Andy Sieg, Citi’s head of wealth, said this week.

Bank of America analyst Ebrahim Poonawala, talking with Sieg on Wednesday at a BofA Securities financial services conference, mentioned a perception of “a tech product deficit” at Citi given the bank’s technology challenges and that competition “has moved on.”

Sieg acknowledged that Citi’s core managed assets platform has “some scale,” but “needs work to adjust, so that we can deliver the kind of unified managed account experience that U.S. investors and, increasingly, investors around the world are looking for.” 

Sieg, who had been president of BofA’s Merrill Lynch Wealth Management, joined Citi in September 2023.

Citi has been going through a massive digital transformation; after a number of acquisitions over a period of years, the bank never fully integrated systems, operations and technologies to the level that they could have been, which has made the endeavor an even taller order, CFO Mark Mason has said. 

Product capabilities are “largely there,” Sieg said Wednesday, but “it hasn’t been architected or connected in a way that delivers the kind of experience we want to deliver for clients, which enables them to have a broad, holistic relationship with us. They tend to be more single-product consumers of what Citi has to offer. And it’s extremely difficult for advisers and service personnel to navigate many of our platforms.” 

Sieg is optimistic, however, that the Citi-wide focus on data and its technology architecture creates a tailwind. 

As the bank works through nagging data quality issues, Citi aims to “use the fact that we’re behind today as a challenge and an opening to be innovative, and to find ways to leapfrog,” he said. That’s an underappreciated opportunity artificial intelligence has created, he added. 

Bank partners like Palantir, Google and Snowflake have the lender in a position to make progress “in months, which once in my career would have been years of progress to move the platforms forward,” Sieg said. 

The bank’s wealth division generated $7.5 billion in revenue in 2024, according to a presentation Sieg shared. The wealth unit had about 12,300 employees as of Dec. 31 – about 13% fewer than it had at the end of 2023 – and fourth-quarter revenue was up 20% year-over-year. 

“This is just getting us to base camp in terms of where we should be going as a wealth business,” Sieg said, noting it’s a client-by-client, adviser-by-adviser effort to grow the business. 

Citi CEO Jane Fraser has said the wealth segment is key to improving the bank’s business mix by adding more fee-based revenue. The unit’s return on tangible common equity was 10.1% for the fourth quarter, and the bank aims to get that to 15% to 20% in 2026.

Citi is less focused on new client acquisition and more on expanding its relationships with existing clients. The wealth business counted about 628,000 clients with a little over $1 trillion in balances last year. But the bank’s current clients have $5 trillion invested elsewhere.

“We've got tremendous reach around the world,” he said, “but in aggregate, a very low share of wallet.” 

“We need to be able to show up, show them more of the capabilities that we can deliver and deepen relationships,” he said.

In “an incredibly competitive market” in the U.S. and globally, Sieg said Citi is leaning into its ability “to provide global service to increasingly global clients, this very high echelon of clients.” The bank has a presence in 80 countries. 

Although Citi has just 600 branches in the U.S., those locations are in six major markets making up about 40% of ultra-high net worth U.S. business, Sieg noted.

Sieg also emphasized a sharp focus on “frontline productivity.” 

“We’re not going to be bringing the expense base in absolute terms down a lot from where we are,” he said. “What we're going to be ensuring that we're doing is making it more productive over time.

“We need a little quarter-by-quarter operating leverage being delivered here, to get the story moving at full speed,” he said.