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In the summer of 2024, the screens inside the elevators at 388 Greenwich were broadcasting a message to everyone passing through: we need to change the internal perception of ourselves. We are not a bad bank.
By August of that year, internal communications were acknowledging that Citi lagged behind its competitors in all aspects material to running a business. That included risk management and financial management.
And yet. By end of 2025, news were shared that the consent order was near closed out.
Eighteen months. From regulators who didn’t believe Citi knew how to resource the remediation, to closure. That’s one hell of a recovery.
If the recovery was as total as the headlines suggested, it represents one of the most successful corporate turnarounds in modern finance.
However, the speed of that transition—from “lagging in all aspects” to “remediated”—suggests either an unprecedented mobilization of resources or a very strategic narrowing of what “done” actually looks like.
“The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those who speak it” said Orwell.
The truth usually sits somewhere between the elevator screens and the regulatory filings.