Dive Brief:
- Citi CEO Jane Fraser welcomed former PwC senior partner Tim Ryan to the bank’s technology leadership team in a LinkedIn post last week. Ryan took the helm as Citi’s head of technology and business enablement this month.
- Ryan will lead Citi’s technology and legacy franchise efforts and work with the bank’s transformation and operations teams to help drive an ongoing modernization and process simplification push, according to the company.
- In his new role, Ryan will also take point on adopting emerging technologies, “including making sure our businesses are fully enabled by AI and are using technology to be as efficient and productive as possible,” Fraser said.
Dive Insight:
Ryan began the job in the wake of a broad organizational restructuring that reached the top of the IT ladder.
In March, Citi said it had completed the final phase of “major actions” aimed at simplifying the bank’s operating model. Nevertheless, the company announced Ryan’s appointment just as Mike Whitaker, the executive who led Citi’s operations and technology team since 2018, left his position last month. Whitaker was part of the new executive management team Fraser formed last year.
The bank also reshuffled its CIO team last year. Jonathan Lofthouse was elevated to co-CIO alongside Shadman Zafar in November. Stuart Riley, who’d been co-CIO with Zafar for just three months, left the position at that time.
Technology is a key pillar of the bank’s modernization strategy. The company invested more than $12 billion in technology last year, a 9% increase over 2022. More than half of the spending went into modernization initiatives, which eliminated nearly 400 legacy applications.
The spending trend continued into the first quarter, when Citi’s expenses increased 11%, driven by ongoing investments in technology and product innovation, CFO Mark Mason said during an April earnings call.
“We’re currently deep into a very large body of work, upgrading our data architecture, automating manual controls and processes [and] consolidating fragmented tech platforms,” Fraser said during the call.
Enterprise data systems modernization is crucial to lay the groundwork for generative AI, and the banking industry stands to reap big gains from the technology.
Citi signaled its eagerness to ease adoption last month by backing a Fintech Open Source Foundation initiative aimed at defining a governance framework for the safe sourcing, development and deployment of generative AI-based solutions in the finance industry.
Ryan's arrival brings a familiar face to the bank's technology leadership team. “Tim is no stranger to Citi — we’ve been his client for the last 10 years,” Fraser said in the post.
