Dive Overview:
Citi CEO Jane Fraser Welcomed ex Senior Partner at PwC Tim Ryan For bank technology leadership teams LinkedIn Post Last week, Ryan was in the City Head of Technology and Business To enablet this month.
Ryan will lead Citi’s technology and legacy franchise efforts, working with the bank’s transformation and operations teams to help drive continued modernization and process simplification. According to the company:.
In his new role, Ryan will also be working on the adoption of emerging technologies, including “ensuring that our business is fully enabled by AI and leveraging technology to be as efficient and productive as possible.” Fraser Said.
Dive Insights:
Ryan takes on the job following a major organizational restructuring that extended all the way to the top of IT.
Citi said in March that it had completed the final stages of a “major initiative” aimed at simplifying the bank’s operating model. The bank nonetheless announced Ryan’s appointment just days after Mike Whittaker, who had led Citi’s operations and technology team since 2018, left the role last month. Whittaker was part of the new executive leadership team that Fraser put together last year.
The bank also reshuffled its CIO team last year, with Jonathan Lofthouse promoted to co-CIO alongside Shadman Zafar in November, after Stuart Riley, who had been co-CIO with Zafar for just three months, stepped down from the role 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 to modernization initiatives, which saw the retirement of about 400 legacy applications.
The spending trend continued in the first quarter, with Citi’s expenses increasing 11% due to continued investments in technology and product innovation, Chief Financial Officer Mark Mason said on the April earnings call.
“We are currently working on a very large-scale effort that involves upgrading our data architecture, automating manual controls and processes. [and] “We are unifying fragmented technology platforms,” Fraser said on the conference call.
Modernizing enterprise data systems is essential to lay the foundation for generative AI, and the banking industry stands to greatly benefit from this technology.
Last month, Citi signaled its desire to ease adoption by supporting the Fintech Open Source Foundation’s efforts to define a governance framework for the secure procurement, development and deployment of generative AI-based solutions in the financial industry.
Ryan’s arrival adds a familiar face to the bank’s technology leadership team. “Tim is no stranger to Citi; we have been his clients for the past decade,” Fraser said in the post.
