Why Jane Fraser, Future Citi CEO, Left Goldman Sachs



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It is happening. Citi announced today that Jane Fraser, currently CEO of its global consumer banking division, will replace CEO Mike Corbat, who plans to retire in February 2021. Fraser will become the first CEO of a major US bank.

Fraser said she is “honored” and “excited” about her new role. However, her career could have turned out very differently if she had not started working in the investment banking division of Goldman Sachs.

In an interview with CNN six years ago, Fraser said her time working on mergers and acquisitions at Goldman Sachs in the early 1990s was enough to put her out of investment banking forever. When she worked at Goldman, there were no female role models that resembled a family life and a career, Fraser said. “You got information about things you could never imagine in your 20s … But when I thought about the long term, I wanted to have a family and that motivated me, when I left business school in the United States and then said” Okay, It’s not about going back to investment banking, but to McKinsey, “he said.

Fraser spent a decade at McKinsey, where he impressed his boss in the interview saying that he would only take the job if he could work for the banking director. She had two children and shortly after the birth of her first child she was promoted to partner. “It was chaotic, I was just hoping that the New York office boss would hang up the phone because she needed to feed the baby,” Fraser told CNN.

While Goldman seemed to have almost no older women with a family at this stage in Fraser’s career, at McKinsey she could work part-time and be a partner. “It was tough,” she explained. “ANDYou’re seeing people that you’ve managed and brought into the company and then they progress faster than you, so there’s an ego. “

Fraser said working mothers need strict limits and they are worth respecting. “I hAnnouncement to tell clients that I couldn’t attend meetings on Thursday, because Thursday was the day I was home with my son.

“It made you human,” he added. “If you don’t have humanity, you are simply not relevant.”

Six years ago, he also refuted the view that women cannot have careers and children. “You can’t have it all at the same time. You can have it all spread out for decades, ”Fraser said. “You have to say, ‘That’s compensation for now, I’ll get to that later.”

Having made those trade-offs, Fraser now has the lead role in America’s fourth-largest bank. Given her experience in the retail and wealth management sector, some members of Citi’s Institutional Client Group (ICG) may be concerned. Jamie Forese, the former head of Citi’s ICG, which houses its investment banking and business operations, was once in the race to replace Corbat, but left after 34 years in April 2019 and is now in cages. as a non-executive director at HSBC.

In a note today on Fraser’s appointment, KBW analysts said that if she can improve Citi’s returns near the level of her peers, her promotion should be positive. However, they suggested that “some investors were expecting an outsider to come in and do a major reorganization of Citigroup, so we expect a neutral reaction in equities to the news.”

Goldman Sachs has clearly changed dramatically since the early 1990s and now has many high-level female role models, including Kim Posnett, Global Head of Internet Investment Banking and Tammy Kiely, Global Head of Semiconductor Investment Banking, who were promoted last year.

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