Multinational investment bank Citigroup on Thursday named its consumer head Jane Fraser as the next chief executive officer of the company, making her the first woman to ever lead a Wall Street bank, Reuters reported. She will take over after the bank’s current chief Michael Corbat resigns in February, the lender said.
Fraser began her career at Goldman Sachs Group Inc’s mergers and acquisitions department in London, before starting to work for Asesores Bursátiles in Madrid. She has been working for Citigroup for 16 years and been serving in her current capacity since 2019, BBC reported.
She had helped Citigroup recover after facing a financial crisis when it had to borrow $45 billion in taxpayer funds to continue its operations. Fraser has been handling client strategy for the lender’s investment bank and well as private bank arms and its operations in Latin America, which formed 14% of Citigroup’s annual revenue in 2019.
John Dugan, chief of Citigroup’s board of directors, said Fraser would take the bank to the next level. “She has deep experience across our lines of business and regions and we are highly confident in her,” he said.
Fraser’s promotion is seen as a step in the right direction as men have dominated the upper ranks of banks and other financial firms for long. Corbat called the move to promote Fraser a groundbreaking event and a moment of pride for Citigroup.
Fraser has been open about her struggles as a woman and a mother in the banking industry. In an interview with CNN in 2018, she spoke about leading the bank’s division on Latin America. “When I first was put in charge of Latin America, there was some pretty negative headlines in the press of Mexico about having a female foreigner with responsibility,” she had said. “And this was seen as a bit of an insult in Mexico.”
In 2016, she talked about her early days as an investment banker, when women were expected to act and dress like men as well as her problems with juggling career and motherhood. “I’m often asked, ‘Can you have it all? Can you do it all?’” she had said. “And I say, ‘Yes, you can, but you can’t do it all at once and don’t expect everything at once.”
Later in the CNN interview, she expressed her wish to lead a Wall Street bank. “I look forward to seeing a woman being the first CEO of a Wall Street firm whoever that may be,” Fraser said. “I’ve never had the ambition to be the CEO of Citigroup or any other organisation. Things can change over time. But at the moment, I’ve still got a lot to learn.”
The 53-year-old investment banker was born in St Andrews, Scotland. She moved to the United States because she felt women had more opportunities in the country. However, only 31 women hold the top spot in American companies listed on the S&P 500 index at the end of 2019. None of these companies led by women are banks. Further, women lead only 37 companies on 2020’s Fortune 500 list.
Fraser will be joining a small group of women leaders at the executive-level managerial position in major financial firms. British bank NatWest CEO Alison Rose, Fidelity Investments chief Abigail Johnson, Bank of America Corp operations and technology chief Cathy Bessant, JPMorgan’s consumer lending head Marianne Lake and its finance chief Jennifer Piepszak are among those part of the group.
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