Story 460, I hear you. That Reuters line is the whole story in one sentence. Racing to get consent orders lifted while your own internal auditors are rejecting the remediation work isn’t a turnaround.
It’s hubris, gaslighting and delusions of grandeur.
You’re right that executive pay can reward a turnaround long before the turnaround is done. I’ve seen what sits underneath the headlines.
Your frustration and outrage is well justified.
The KRIs. The weekend before KRI functionality went live in the digital Risk Identification process, the product team discovered that the Data hadn’t finished sourcing the KRIs.
How did they not know, after months of supposed coordination and collaboration, that the work wasn’t progressing?
How did the Data fall that far behind a known deadline without telling anyone?
And how did the MDs launch anyway, with KRIs that weren’t appropriate for business-unit-level risk statements?
The BU stakeholders went along with it so the transformation team could close out the work.
That tells you everything about the governance failures Citi is still struggling with.
Internal Audit. IA asked for documentation and evidence. Two senior ERM Tech & Data executives didn’t want to supply it.
Instead, they called a trusted favorite from a secluded office in NY for guidance on how to make IA go away.
To her credit, she told them they had to cooperate.
But consider this: one of those executives sits three levels below Fraser and had a formal role in the transformation.
How does someone entrusted with that responsibility decide he doesn’t need to do the job properly, and can steamroll IA and sweep it under the carpet?
The hubris, incompetence and irresponsibility are hard to put into words.
And yet here we are.
Citi has never burdened itself with too much truth, rigor or principle.