Story 223

To the person/group who started this website, a very big and heartfelt thank you for providing us with a safe platform to tell the truth without having to worry about ramifications and/or retribution. Despite having a safe platform to voice all the injustices, there are still those who rather remain silent and with my entry, I represent all of those voices as well. I have read all 222 stories twice and after having worked at Citi for more than 20 years, I cannot be more embarrassed of where we are today at this firm as well as the state of the banking industry in 2026. But it wasn’t like this when I first started. Let me explain.

When I started at Citi more than 20 years ago, I could not be more proud walking into the office everyday and knowing that I represented the very best of this firm. Although things were extremely tough going through the subprime crisis as I wondered if we could get through the huge setback even with TARP, I had every confidence and everyone believed in Vikram and Mike to get us through the predicament. No matter how difficult things became, our two leaders never wavered and we could always rely on them to make ethical decisions, steer us in the right direction and always do the right thing. The few things I was most proud of working for this company was having leaders who were incredibly inspiring, team-mates who conquered adversity together and knowing that incompetence and injustices would not be tolerated.

And now? I cannot recognise this place anymore and I am too embarrassed to tell people where I work/worked: leaders won’t answer questions from employees because their pay grade is not “high enough”, bullies hiding behind a 5 letter acronym verbally and sexually assaulting women while orally abusing men, employees getting paid more than Jane on a per hour basis putting in barely 2 hours of work and procrastinating for 8, employees being extremely proud of getting by with doing the least amount of work and finding ways do get others to do theirs, managers who don’t have a clue what they are doing and who do an amazing job finding people to blame for their incompetencies and the list goes on and on. The straw that broke the camel’s back was when I brought up an issue with another MD and his response was “This is how it has always been done here and if you don’t’ like that, you can leave”. This is the exact opposite of what one of the internal trainings that had emphasised what not to do. Recently our net revenue targets have doubled from a year earlier. With the current competitive environment, where exactly are we supposed to find these new sources? Shall we get compliance to start working on cross-planet procedures and will try to find what kind of assets aliens might have?

Where did we go wrong? In my humble opinion, very simply, the current leaders managed to get to the top and have their own selfish agenda. If doing the right and moral thing conflicts with that agenda, they will always choose the latter. They put deputies in place to further that agenda and those who suffer are the ones who put their head down, who don’t complain and do all the work to carry the company.

What can we do? Having this platform is a good start. I cannot emphasise enough the message from Story 104: “We must do what they fear-tell the truth, spread the truth”. We must recognise that HR is not here to help employees but to promote and advance the agenda of those in power. I echo Story 219 as I have also read the shareholder letter and indeed, there is no mention of ‘human’ input. I didn’t realize that 220,000 employees must be a misprint and that AI has already fully taken over. If management doesn’t make a conscious effort to pretend to care about the voices of employees, time to think about plan B and please do your friends a favour, make sure they stay as far away from this bank as possible.

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