Why Banga quit Citi
June 2009
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"The new structure is designed to bring us closer together as a firm to serve clients without diluting the strength of any one business"
Ajay Banga, Citi |
THE FINANCIAL WORLD of March 2008 was very different to the one we now inhabit. One of the most over-leveraged of US investment banks, Bear Stearns, was being bundled up and sold for a song to JPMorgan; another, Lehman Brothers, was but months from unwitting bankruptcy. In the UK, "bailout" was still a dirty word, and "nationalization" had barely been used since the 1970s.
Yet at one global lender, then the biggest of them all, life was still being lived in the past. A year back Citi’s Asia-Pacific division, directed out of Hong Kong and Tokyo, still operated as a clunky, silo-driven structure that had changed little since the $140 billion merger of Citicorp and Travelers Group in 1998....
