Jonathan Lofthouse, Head of Markets and Enterprise Risk Technology, said Citigroup plans to hire more than 4,000 tech workers to help digitize services for institutional clients.

Why should we care?
According to Chief Financial Officer Mark Mason, Citi has raised its tech spending by 10% to $10B. On one front, the bank is competing with other giants like JPMorgan, which has made concerted efforts to expand its tech-based initiatives. But on another front, the hiring move is a sorely needed branding exercise. Citi entered into two consent orders with the U.S. Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency in 2020, after Citi paid $900M to creditors of cosmetics giant Revlon accidentally. The bank’s internal controls systems still don’t work as well as they should given last month’s “fat finger” error, which was caused by a staffer at Citi accidentally adding an extra zero to a trade, and internal algorithms failing to flag the mistake. Citigroup may be liable for up to $50M for that mistake. As such, Citigroup’s attempt to become more of a fintech on the institutional client side isn’t just a question of customer retention: it’s a risk mitigation strategy hoping to prevent future costly blunders.