Shaukat Aziz
Such was the arrogance of the old Citibank regime that John Reed was widely quoted as believing his executives were diminishing themselves by working for countries rather than for his all-conquering bank. Not so now. Pakistan’s finance minister, Shaukat Aziz, says: “It’s a privilege for anybody to be asked to serve their country. I am now on leave of absence from Citi. I work here in Islamabad as a volunteer, I receive no compensation either from Citi or the government.”
No banker was better equipped to bridge the divide between government and banking than Aziz. His work in Citi’s corporate banking area had brought him into contact with several Asian governments, and his technical expertise equipped him with a knowledge of markets that he could impart to central bankers and finance ministers at whose tables he was a familiar guest. So in 1999, when he was asked by the non-elected president of Pakistan to take the finance role, he considered it “a patriotic duty to accept”.
Aziz joined Citibank’s Karachi office in November 1969 and worked in the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, Greece, the UK, Jordan and Saudi Arabia before moving to New York. At different times, he was head of the Asia Pacific region and head of central and eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa for corporate banking out of London. He was also head of the global private bank. Dick Huber says of the man who was his chief of staff: “Shaukat is a very wily, clever guy. He was a wonderful chief of staff.” When Citibank faced severe problems in 1990, Aziz was one of the 12 top executives to whom John Reed turned to advise him on the turnaround.
Richard Braddock
No-one quite understood why Rick Braddock left Citibank in 1992. The bank, where he was president, seemed to have overcome some of its worst travails in real estate and LDC debt, and Braddock was gaining kudos for swinging the axe. But he was certainly not leaving to go into obscurity. Braddock took on a number of industrial assignments, before receiving the call to rescue PriceLine.com. The marketing skills Braddock learnt at Citi over 20 years appear to have equipped him to mount one of the few dot com rescues that might actually succeed. Bill Rhodes remembers Braddock as “a talented, bright guy”.
He joined Citi in 1973 from General Foods – at about the same time as Pei-yuan Chia, who became Citi’s head of global consumer businesses, replacing Braddock on his departure from Citi – where he had acquired experience as a marketer in fast-moving consumer goods. He sped up the ranks of Citi’s growing consumer banking business over the course of the next two decades. Working in alliance with Dick Kovacevitch, who would later head Wells Fargo, and Rana Talwar, who went to Standard Chartered, Braddock turned Citibank into banking’s most formidable marketing institution.
Reed recognized Braddock’s ability and promoted him to president of the bank at a time when it was experiencing its worst travails in LDC debt and real estate lending. The change from buoyant and breezy marketer to the bank’s hatchet man soured Braddock and led to a falling out with Reed. “The consumer bank effort bore the brunt,” Braddock says. “I had to downsize the bank when I was president. That was less fun, and I started looking elsewhere.”
Braddock continues to try to do deals with Citibank, but he says they are “more talk than deals.” In any event, now that he has left the financial sector, he has little interest in keeping in touch with his old networks inside the bank.
Tom Theobald and Dick Huber
Citi’s intensely competitive culture over the past two decades has produced as much bloodletting as it has creative tension. This inevitably released onto the open market some top Citibankers who went to positions of power in American finance.
Reed’s appointment in 1984 to the top job at Citi sent the second choices running for alternatives. Prime among these was Tom Theobald, who spent 27 years at the bank rising through the corporate and investment banking wing to become vice-chairman. Theobald was widely tipped to succeed Walter Wriston, the legendary chairman, but his bid failed, and in 1987 he accepted an offer from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to rescue the ailing Continental Bank. From there he became part of the great and good of US commerce, sitting on the boards of many leading international companies, such as Siemens and SKF.
Some 14 years later, Theobald puts a brave face on the loss of the top job. “I always felt that Wriston had done me a huge favour, because I had more fun and made more money than I would ever have done at Citi.”
Theobald’s departure was followed by that of several others including three bankers who eventually served on his team at Continental. They were Bobby Meyjes, Citi’s head of international private banking, Alan Weber and Dick Huber.
The trigger for Huber’s departure was a falling out with one of Reed’s protégés, Larry Small, the president of Citibank, who had replaced Theobald on his departure. Huber says: “Larry almost tanked the bank because he made the big play in real estate in the late eighties. When he became the head of the whole wholesale bank, I didn’t think I would enjoy it.” Small himself left shortly afterwards, going first to be vice-chairman of Fannie Mae. Last year he became secretary of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC.
The bank showed little regret about Huber’s departure. One Citi insider suggested that Huber, who joined in 1973, left because he felt he was not making the progress he thought was his due. “Some people leave because they feel they’re not moving ahead at the pace they would like to move ahead. People feel there’s a better opportunity elsewhere.”
Huber went initially to Chase to head its capital markets business but did not like the Chase culture, he says, and followed his buddy Theobald to Continental as vice-chairman. “It turned out to be a much tougher task than either of us had bargained for,” Huber says. “We patched it up rather nicely and sold it on to Bank of America. Then I got conned into going to the Aetna insurance company as vice-chairman and CFO in early 1995.” Huber was CEO of Aetna until early 2000 when he became a partner of Kissinger McLartey with a particular interest in private-equity investments in Latin America.
Huber now runs investments in Latin America, including a transport concern, where he is chairman. He is thought to be looking for an important job in US finance, but according to insiders at Citibank, his reputation for changing his mind – said to have brought him down at Aetna – goes before him.
Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf
If any bank or company based in Africa has a problem with Citibank, they are likely to be directed to Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf. This remarkable woman, who would not on first sight seem an obvious financier, no longer has any formal connection with the bank, but she has close bonds to it for personal and family reasons. The bank not only saved her from the bloodshed that followed a coup in her native Liberia, but it kept her on its books during a period of imprisonment. The bank retains the relationship with the family, having appointed Ellen’s son Charles to its London-based corporate staff.
Johnson-Sirleaf was the Liberian finance minister in 1980 when the government was overthrown in a coup, and most of her colleagues were rounded up and shot on the beach. The finance minister lost her job, but her life was spared. As a quid pro quo, she took it upon herself to introduce her replacement at the finance ministry to the heads of the country’s primary banks, including Citibank. Johnson-Sirleaf says: “Maybe I owed them one. It was clear that I wouldn’t remain in the country and I left the country.”
In fact, it looks like a well-judged piece of altruism, because Citibank promptly offered her a job as a vice-president. Citibank had earlier closed its office in Monrovia, the Liberian capital, but it had a vacancy in the Nairobi office. Johnson-Sirleaf did country risk assessment for Africa under the direction of Jack Clark, who was a senior vice-president in New York. She later moved into a more traditional line of banking, liaising with financial institutions working in so-called non-preference countries.
In the course of her stay at the bank, she began to rebuild her political connections with Liberia, but this brought her into further jeopardy. She was arrested, tried for sedition and sentenced to 10 years’ hard labour. After nine months in jail, the efforts of the bank and the US government paid off and Johnson-Sirleaf was released. She now accepted that her financial career was no longer compatible with politics and she left Citibank. She went on to work at the UN becoming a deputy secretary, and she also served on many UN committees concerned with human rights.
Johnson-Sirleaf stood in the 1997 Liberian presidential elections, but was heavily defeated by Charles Taylor. There will be more elections in two years’ time in which she intends to stand. She says that if she is elected, one of her first acts will be to invite Citibank to Liberia.
Her affection for Citibank remains undimmed. “When I work with other countries, I am able to talk about the value of Citibank, the services of Citi. Every now and again, when there is a problem with Citibank, people come to me because they know I have colleagues there who may be able to sort it out. I feel a bond with the bank, I feel they are colleagues. I feel their service to Africa and the developing countries is good. I think they understand Africa. They had a long presence in Africa and they have remained there. You can dialogue with them.”
Cezary Stypulkowski
When Citibank decided to pitch for Bank Handlowy, it had an advantage over all other suitors for the bank. Its chairman had been trained by Citi and the US bank had remained on good terms with him. When Bill Rhodes met Cezary Stypulkowski in Warsaw in 1987, he was seen as one of the young turks of Polish banking who would pioneer the building of a capitalist economy. Rhodes met him again when he was a Fulbright scholar at Columbia Business School in New York two years later. This time, Rhodes asked him to become a trainee at the bank to prepare him for a role in a Polish operation that Citi was still preparing. Rhodes remembered: “I had targeted him as someone who could help drive our organization in Poland and we hired him as our first trainee in Poland.”
But Citibank vacillated about opening its Polish operation, and in the meantime Poland’s finance minister, Leszek Balcerowicz, had invited the young banker to run the country’s largest commercial bank, Handlowy. The 34-year-old was awed by the responsibility. “I remember people looking at me suspiciously. I invented a standard response to the smiles on people’s faces. I said: ‘I know that I am too young for my position, but I am really quite conservative.”
Stypulkowski says his Citibank traineeship taught him some of the rudiments of the job. “I still keep the credit manual, which I have to admit I brought with me from Citi. It gave me a backbone to understand how to structure the credit process.”
Stypulkowski introduced private-sector processes into Handlowy and in due course this state institution became a valuable asset. In July 1999, his former employers were again banging at his door. But this time it was in the role of suitor, rather than master. His old mentor and friend at Citi, Bill Rhodes, was quickly on the phone discussing the deal. Another was the Citibank president Victor Menezes, who quipped at the time that the bank had had to “pay a billion dollars to bring Stypulkowski back into the bank”. Stypulkowski later admitted that he thought Menezes was exaggerating.
Shaukat Tareen
The entrepreneurial skills honed at Citibank have frequently prepared former Citibankers to do their own thing outside the bank. That has certainly been the case with Shaukat Tareen who has linked up with Saudi friends to create Union Bank. This Pakistani institution now has half a billion dollars worth of assets, and its founder is in regular touch with former friends at Citibank discussing projects and deals.
Tareen joined Citibank aged 22, straight from university. After working in Pakistan for some 10 years he moved on to the United Arab Emirates and became country manager for Oman. In 1987, aged 34, he took over as area manager for consumer banking for the Gulf. “Citi is used to this kind of stuff,” he says. “They give you early responsibility.”
He returned to Pakistan in 1990 as country manager and in 1995 he went to Thailand as country manager. In 1996, he was approached by Pakistan’s prime minister to return to his homeland and turn round the largest state sector bank, Habib Bank. When his two-year secondment ended, he says he “realized that the bank had changed dramatically when Travelers took over. I decided not to return to Citi.”
“I decided to work for myself. So a Saudi friend and I took over Union Bank in Pakistan, and Union Bank took over Bank of America in Pakistan a year later. We have a half billion dollar bank in assets. We are looking at building a small international bank.”
Rana Talwar
Citibank has accepted the departure of numerous top bankers with equanimity, and some it has positively encouraged to go. But one banker left despite the pleading and begging of Bill Rhodes and others at the highest level. This was Rana Talwar, who had the vision to see that the future lay in consumer banking and the intelligence to implement his plans to Citi’s enormous benefit.
Rhodes says: “I was very sorry to see Rana leave. It’s worked out very well for him. I see Rana from time to time, and we’re friends and have a good relationship.”
Talwar went on to a job that involved directly competing with his former firm. As the chief executive of Standard Chartered, Talwar has begun building an operation to rival Citi’s in the emerging markets. Numerous Asian branches of Standard Chartered are run by former Citibank executives, who undoubtedly regarded his period at the bank as a golden age. Talwar’s former Citibank colleague, John McFarlane, had also worked at Standard Chartered after leaving Citi in 1993, before moving to ANZ in 1997 as CEO.
Talwar was the beneficiary of Citi’s philosophy of hiring and giving responsibility to people from its foreign offices’ localities. He joined as a management trainee in 1969, in his native India, on Rs850 a month, about $10 in today’s money. Talwar worked in India for seven years in corporate banking and treasury before moving to Saudi Arabia. Still in his twenties, he was made the treasurer of a Citi joint venture called Saudi-American Bank.
A speech by John Reed fired Talwar’s enthusiasm for consumer banking. Talwar says: “All my friends said ‘you must be crazy’. I was in the treasury, this was the precursor of investment banking. ‘You are getting big bonuses,’ they said, ‘what’s this consumer stuff you want to get into.’ I said, ‘Look, I think I’ll enjoy the involvement with advertising, marketing and building a new business that didn’t exist.'”
“Everybody said ‘John [Reed] is going to get fired, the consumer bank’s losing money, it’s a pipe dream. We are bankers, and people have to be corporate banker types.’ People thought I was crazy, first to leave a well-paid, high-bonus investment banking job, and go into schmucky consumer stuff. Second, to leave Tom Theobald’s team, and go to the losing team of John Reed. Of course, four years later, John became chairman.”
Talwar cut his teeth in consumer banking in Hong Kong in 1981, as chief of staff to the executive running the Asia-Pacific region. But when he tried to move into virgin territory in Asia – in such countries as Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and India where Citi’s consumer banking was untried – his boss rebelled. “He said: ‘you’re mad, no way.'”
But the callow young banker got his way, and the business was so successful that Talwar quickly expanded his horizons to include Taiwan, Korea and Japan. Talwar now says that his push in Asia produced “probably the strongest set of businesses Citi has anywhere. They are great brands, great consumer businesses. By the time I left, the Asian consumer piece was making $500 million after tax.”
By 1991, when the bank hit a rough patch, Talwar was among its most respected managers and Reed included him in the group of 12 executives detailed to help resolve the problems. He was also running consumer operations for both Europe and the US, and widely talked about as a successor to Reed, alongside Victor Menezes and Shaukat Aziz.
Media lists of possible successors invariably included his name, but Reed held him back. In requiring Talwar to report to him through Bill Campbell, he provoked Talwar’s departure, says Shaukat Tareen, who remains a friend of Talwar. “Reed wanted him to play second fiddle to someone who he [Talwar] thought was not up to the mark. So Rana left, said ‘to hell with you. I work very hard, I produce the results, you take the credit.’ He said to Reed, ‘either you make me a direct report or I’m leaving.’ He was handling one of the largest jobs in the bank but he was still reporting to Bill Campbell. Campbell had been brought in from Philip Morris, he was a fine consumer guy but he didn’t know much about banking. Rana knew the entire Europe and the entire US. He was still not reporting to John.”
Talwar is now building an emerging markets empire to challenge that of his former team. In due course Citi may pay for the loss of its prodigal son.
Rafael Buenaventura
Citibank’s policy of giving responsibility to talent from local markets is well demonstrated by the success of Rafael Buenaventura. Between 1965 and 1989, he raced through the ranks of the Asian businesses, in some cases establishing treasury and other networks to implement the aspirations of his boss Rana Talwar.
Buenaventura’s career really took off in 1971 when he joined the famous International Staff (usually abridged to IS) becoming country head in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore. This was a period of expansion and pioneering banking, so Buenaventura was in Singapore when the Asian Currency Unit was launched in Asia. From there he negotiated the funding requirement for Citibank’s investment bank in Asia. He was treasurer in Hong Kong for four and a half years, and head of merchant banking for southeast Asia. His final posting was as division executive for all of southern Europe, when he was based in Milan.
The circumstances surrounding Buenaventura’s departure from Citi were as amicable as the rest of his banking career. He simply “wanted to go home to the Philippines”. He says: “I joined a local bank, which was voted the most outstanding bank in Asia. I took my Citibank skills and contact book into the private sector. Contacts were always useful, but what was more important was the years of experience and exposure to dealing with so many types of people. This gave me the ability to walk into a new situation and adapt to it.
“What you learnt in Citi, was that although you worked within the same organization, you got transferred from one county to another – I worked in seven different countries. I had to learn to deal with the Turks as well as the Greeks, and the Spanish. In Asia I was dealing with the Indians as well as the Koreans. When I came back to the Philippines, I learnt to deal with an organization that was totally foreign to me. I had acquired the ability to be flexible, and have an open mind in dealing with organizations.”
He showed his flexibility and effortless capacity for finding and slotting into top jobs when he joined PCIBank. After 10 years he planned to retire from full-time work, take a year off banking altogether, and then accept some consultancies for local and international firms.
But in 1999, he received an invitation to become the central bank governor of the Philippines. The former Citi man had already handled the negotiations for the restructuring of the Philippines sovereign debt back in the mid-1980s and was well qualified to liaise with international institutions. Today, Buenaventura is one of the region’s leading central bank governors.
As the official regulator for foreign banks in the region, he receives many courtesy calls from former Citi colleagues such as Rana Talwar when they are touring the region and want to ensure that their locals are up to the mark.
