She was at a gas station in Idaho — the kind of nowhere stop between Wyoming and Montana where the pumps are slow and the cell signal is worse — when the text arrived. It was the Friday before Labor Day, 2020. Jane Fraser and her husband, Alberto Piedra, a banker she had married in 1996, were five hours into a drive from their house in Wyoming to a weekend of fly fishing. Bert, as she calls him, was "all excited" about it. The message was from her boss, Michael Corbat, the chief executive officer of Citigroup: "Can you call me on Saturday morning?"
Fraser called immediately. The conversation was brief. Corbat told her she needed to turn around and drive five hours back to Wyoming. He was coming to see her. He had decided now was the right time to retire, and he needed to talk to her about that.
So she and Bert abandoned the fishing trip — the five hours already driven, the rods packed in the back, the whole weekend mapped out — and drove back the way they came. What waited at the other end of that reverse commute was the biggest job in American banking ever offered to a woman, and arguably the most thankless. The next Wednesday, Citigroup's board voted. Fraser didn't count her chickens until after. "I did call them up after the board meeting and say, 'So…'" she has recalled, laughing. The board confirmed what the text from the gas station had set in motion.
In March 2021, Jane Fraser formally became chief executive officer of Citigroup — the first woman to run a major Wall Street bank, the inheritor of a $2.2 trillion institution that had been, for the better part of two decades, the most reliably disappointing franchise in American finance. She was 53. She was Scottish. She was, in a phrase she'd later deploy with characteristic dryness, "a Scots woman running an American bank — a global bank." The implied corollary: everything that followed would be done her way, which was to say differently from the way it had been done before, which was to say differently from the way anything on Wall Street had ever been done.
"I was a whole mixture — proud, surprised," she told American Banker years later, recalling the moment. "A whole mixture of delighted, but also 'Gosh, this is happening quickly, and I need to get my act together fast.'"
Getting her act together fast would prove to be the defining understatement of her tenure. What she inherited was not merely a bank in need of improvement but a vast, creaking organism that had been operating under federal consent orders since 2020, that had mistakenly sent nearly $900 million of its own money to the creditors of a cosmetics company, and that had cycled through three CEOs since the financial crisis without ever resolving its fundamental identity crisis: Was Citigroup a global financial supermarket, or was it something that could actually be managed?
Part IIThe Playbook
Jane Fraser's career is a master class in a particular kind of leadership — one built not on charisma or showmanship but on strategic clarity, the willingness to take broken assignments, and the patient accumulation of institutional knowledge. The principles below are drawn from the observable patterns of her decisions, her public statements, and the arc of her two-decade career at Citigroup.
5.Build the skill that pays off twenty years later.
6.Make empathy operational.
7.Hire people who know more than you do.
Manage the consent order — and the restructuring — without confusing one for the other.
In Their Own Words
There is some crazy pressure on women, and on men, to almost be superwoman or superman, and that's just not realistic.
The advice to everyone is, you can have it all, but don't expect to have it at exactly the same time.
Your career is going to be measured in decades, and you'll probably have many careers in your life, so make sure that you really enjoy each period of your life and make the most of it.
Don't try and achieve everything at the same time and put so much pressure on yourself.
That was a game-changing piece of advice for me, because then I started doing completely different jobs and ones that weren't necessarily logical to most people's thinking.
If we didn't put our people's health and safety first ... I think we would have done a very poor job managing the bank.
Our employees have then rewarded us incredibly because, secure in that and knowing that they were going to be okay, then meant that they would focus on our clients and look after them too.
We will invest in our infrastructure, risk management and controls to ensure that we operate in a safe and sound manner and serve our clients and customers with excellence.
I knew it was going to be multiple years and I knew I had to get a move on: to be bold around it and take tough decisions that hadn't been made before.
We are not done and we've still got a way to go. There is no victory being declared, but there is very clear, demonstrable progress.
There was a lot of pride in some of these retail businesses and it has been hard to let go of them from a cultural point of view.
Having experience of different parts of the bank gives you a lot of courage and conviction, to get clarity quickly about what needs to be done and stick to the plan, even if it's difficult.
By the Numbers
The Citigroup Empire Under Fraser
$2.6TTotal assets under management
$12.7BNet income, fiscal year 2024
~230,000Employees worldwide
160+Countries and jurisdictions served
$20BStock buyback announced in early 2025
$135.6MFederal fine levied in July 2024
5Core business lines post-restructuring
The Boring British Girl
The origin story doesn't announce itself. Jane Fraser was born on July 13, 1967, in St. Andrews, Scotland — which is to say, the most famous small town in golf, a coastal university settlement where the wind off the North Sea cuts through stone and where a child could earn pocket money caddying at the Old Course before she was old enough to fully understand what she was carrying. Fraser was an only child. Her father was an accountant. The details are modest in the way that Scottish modesty tends to be: self-effacing, deflective, with something held in reserve.
When she was twelve, the family relocated to Australia — a disruption large enough to reshape a personality, small enough that Fraser has never made much of it publicly. She had wanted to be a doctor. She was bad at biology. She was good at math and economics. The pivot was pragmatic, unromantic, and consequential. She enrolled at Girton College, Cambridge, where she read economics and graduated in 1988 with what Cambridge tradition later upgrades to an MA.
What happened next was Goldman Sachs, London, at age twenty. Mergers and acquisitions. She would remember herself as "the boring British girl" in an office full of cosmopolitan Europeans who were "a little bit older, they spoke multiple languages, and I just thought they were so much more interesting than I was." The feeling was, by her own account, motivation enough to leave. Not because Goldman was wrong, but because she was not yet the person she wanted to become.
In 1990, she moved to Madrid. For two years she worked at Asesores Bursátiles, a securities firm, and taught herself Spanish — not the polished Castilian of an academic program but the working fluency of someone who needed to close deals in a second language. The Spanish would prove, in ways she could not have anticipated, to be perhaps the single most consequential skill she ever acquired. It would take her to Latin America. Latin America would make her CEO.
After Madrid she went to Harvard Business School, earning her MBA in 1994. She married Piedra in 1996. They would have two sons. And then, rather than returning to a Goldman or a Morgan Stanley, she did something odd: she joined McKinsey & Company, the consulting firm, where she would remain for a decade.
The McKinsey Years and the Book That Changed Everything
McKinsey is a particular kind of institution — part training ground, part finishing school, part sorting mechanism for the global corporate elite. Fraser arrived in 1994 and focused on financial services and global strategy. She made partner. She worked part-time while raising her young children, a fact she has been remarkably candid about: "Being a mother of young children and having a career is the toughest thing I have ever had to do," she has said. "You are exhausted, guilty, and you must learn how to do things differently. It was the making of me because I became much more 80-20 — focusing on what was really important — got good at saying no, and also became more human to the clients who also face many of these issues too."
The McKinsey years produced something else — a book. In 1999, Fraser and three colleagues published Race for the World: Strategies to Build a Great Global Firm, a study of how companies structured to exploit their international reach could achieve exceptional results. The book was a product of research that took Fraser to China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Singapore, and India to interview McKinsey clients about their global challenges. It was, in the parlance of consulting, a framework for thinking about globalization.
But the book's most consequential passage may have been its treatment of a single example: Citigroup. Fraser and her coauthors lauded Citi as a model for "leveraging superior business-system productivity costs in different geographies" — a firm whose global footprint was not a liability but a competitive advantage. The argument brought her to the attention of Michael Klein, then head of Citigroup's investment banking division.
Klein — a dealmaker of the old school, the kind of banker who recognized talent the way a scout recognizes a swing — spent several years trying to recruit her. Several years. Not a call and an offer, but a sustained courtship. Fraser eventually made the move in 2004, joining Citigroup's corporate and investment banking division in London as head of client strategy. She was thirty-seven. She had spent a decade telling companies how to run themselves. Now she would have to do it.
Everyone else was much more exotic, from all over Europe. They were a little bit older, they spoke multiple languages, and I just thought they were so much more interesting than I was.
— Jane Fraser, 2016 speech to the Americas Society and Council of the Americas
The Crisis Portfolio
What distinguishes Fraser's career at Citigroup from the typical ascent of a Wall Street executive is not the number of jobs she held — though there were many — but the character of those jobs. Each was, in some essential way, broken. Each required not just management but triage. Jane Stevenson, head of CEO succession at the executive recruiting firm Korn Ferry, has called Fraser's path "the blueprint": she worked her way through key business units and left each better than she found it. But "better" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Several of those units were in active crisis when she arrived.
She became global head of strategy and mergers and acquisitions in October 2007 — which is to say, weeks before the subprime mortgage collapse began to metastasize into a global financial crisis. Her job, through 2008 and 2009, was to advise senior management on the bank's survival. Citigroup would eventually require $45 billion in federal bailout funds. Fraser was in the room where the long-term planning happened, the triage that determined what could be saved and what had to be amputated.
From 2009 to 2013, she ran Citi Private Bank — which had been posting annual losses of roughly $250 million. She returned it to profitability. In 2013, she took over CitiMortgage during a market-wide collapse in mortgage refinancing demand, closing offices and laying off over a thousand employees. In 2014, she navigated the fallout from Citigroup's $7 billion federal settlement over the quality of mortgage-related financial products sold before the 2008 crisis — a settlement that included a $4 billion penalty to the Justice Department.
In 2015, she was appointed CEO of Citigroup's Latin American operations — the first woman and the first non-Latin American to hold the job. This was where the Spanish from Madrid, learned twenty-five years earlier in a securities office, became the key to a kingdom. The division included Citibanamex, with more than 1,400 retail branches across Mexico and 29 million retail banking consumers. She arrived after Banamex had been fined $2.2 million on fraud charges. She oversaw a multiyear restructuring, a transformation of controls and ethics, and a $1 billion technology investment program in Mexico.
Each assignment was, as she put it, a "leap of faith." Each required her to learn a business she didn't know while simultaneously fixing what was wrong with it. "The most I've ever learned was probably in [the role at CitiMortgage] because it was a crisis and because I didn't know anything," she has said. "I didn't know the business at all and so the leadership skills that you learn, you have to hire people who are better than you, who are more knowledgeable than you, you have to get the team to work together."
The pattern is striking in retrospect. Other executives in the running for a CEO seat tend to inherit well-performing divisions and deliver incrementally better results. Fraser kept getting the hardest assignments — the ones nobody wanted, the ones where failure was visible and success was merely the restoration of normalcy — and she kept making them work.
The Empty Chairs of April 2019
In April 2019, the CEOs of seven of the largest U.S. banks appeared before the House Financial Services Committee. All seven were men. All seven were white. Under oath, they were asked a simple question: Were their successors likely to be female or a person of color?
Not one raised his hand.
The moment was a kind of accidental theater — a tableau that crystallized, in a single visual, what everyone in finance already knew but few would say plainly. Wall Street had never produced a female CEO. The pipeline was not empty so much as it was obstructed, and the obstruction had been so persistent, so unremarkable, so built into the architecture of these institutions, that the men sitting at that table could admit it under oath without apparent embarrassment. Fortune dedicated pages of its 2019 Most Powerful Women issue to three questions: Why had bank CEO suites remained so impenetrable to women? Who might be the first to break through? And when?
The answer to the first question was structural and cultural and deeply boring in the way that systemic problems always are. The answer to the second and third questions arrived eighteen months later, from a gas station in Idaho.
Fraser has been notably unsentimental about the significance of her appointment, even as she acknowledges it. "I think being a woman has been helpful," she has said. "You are a bit different from other leaders, immediately you look different. I've always enjoyed the fact that you can therefore play the game differently, you've almost got licence to have more degrees of freedom, and that's been fun." The word "fun" is doing a lot of work there — wry, disarming, and designed to deflect the weight of symbolism she carries whether she wants to or not.
She has also been clear-eyed about the limits of her appointment as a cultural milestone. "The talent exists, full stop," she told TIME. "And it's time to kill the notion that there's a trade-off between diversity and meritocracy." She pushed Citigroup to publicly disclose its raw pay gap for women globally and for minorities in the U.S. — one of only a handful of major companies to do so. "The data revealed we have a lot of work to do to get more women and people of color in senior and higher-paying roles," she acknowledged. "But we think it's essential to give people the information they need to hold us accountable for progress."
The talent exists, full stop. And it's time to kill the notion that there's a trade-off between diversity and meritocracy.
— Jane Fraser, TIME interview, 2020
The Inheritance
What Fraser inherited in March 2021 was, by the standards of American banking, a particular kind of disaster — not the acute kind, where a bank is on the verge of collapse, but the chronic kind, where it simply cannot seem to get out of its own way.
Citigroup had been operating under two federal consent orders since 2020, imposed by the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. The proximate cause was a spectacular blunder: in August 2020, the bank had mistakenly wired nearly $900 million of its own funds to creditors of Revlon, the cosmetics company. The error — which happened because of antiquated technology systems and inadequate internal controls — was so staggering in its stupidity that it became a parable in financial circles about what happens when a bank's infrastructure fails to keep pace with its ambitions.
But the consent orders reflected deeper problems. Regulators found widespread deficiencies in Citigroup's risk management, data governance, and internal controls — flaws that spoke, in the regulators' blunt assessment, to the bank's "financial safety and soundness." The institution had been cobbled together through decades of mergers and acquisitions, most notably the 1998 merger of Citicorp and Travelers Group that created the modern Citigroup. The resulting entity was an immense, sprawling, structurally incoherent organization — what critics called a "financial services supermarket" — that operated across nearly 100 countries with overlapping divisions, redundant management layers, and technology systems that didn't talk to each other.
JPMorgan Chase under Jamie Dimon had pulled away. Bank of America had staged its post-crisis recovery. Even Wells Fargo, mired in its own scandals, had a clarity of franchise identity that Citigroup lacked. Citi's stock traded below tangible book value for years — the market's way of saying the pieces were worth more than the whole.
Three CEOs had tried and failed to resolve the fundamental question since 2007. Vikram Pandit, a cerebral former hedge fund manager, had navigated the worst of the financial crisis but was pushed out in 2012. Michael Corbat, his successor, was a capable but cautious steward who improved margins but never undertook the radical simplification that analysts demanded. Both men left the structural problem essentially untouched.
Fraser had a line she would use to describe what she intended to do. "Could you describe what you wanted Citi to be, from a strategic point of view, in two sentences to someone in an elevator?" When she got that clarity, she has said, "so much fell into place. The most important piece was what we were going to be, and what therefore we weren't."
The Simplification
In September 2023, Fraser announced the largest restructuring in Citigroup's recent history. The plan was radical in its scope and, in its essential logic, surprisingly simple: strip the bank down to what it does well and discard everything else.
The old Citigroup had been organized around two sprawling divisions — the Institutional Clients Group and the Global Consumer Banking unit — with a byzantine overlay of regional managers, co-heads, and matrix reporting structures. Fraser scrapped this architecture entirely. In its place she created five distinct business lines — Services, Markets, Banking, U.S. Personal Banking, and Wealth — each led by a single executive who reported directly to her. She reduced management layers from thirteen to eight. She eliminated the regional management structure that had added complexity without accountability.
The human cost was staggering. In the first quarter of 2024 alone, approximately 7,000 employees were laid off. The bank estimated that it would cut thousands more over the following two years, incurring as much as $1 billion in severance and restructuring costs. More than 300 senior managers — employees two levels below Fraser's executive team — were let go in a single day in November 2023. "No question, these are the proverbial hard yards," Fraser wrote in a memo to employees. "We always knew that changing the trajectory of our bank would not be easy."
Simultaneously, Fraser launched a campaign to divest Citigroup's international consumer banking operations. She sold nine of the company's fourteen international consumer franchises — a systematic retreat from the retail banking operations in Asia, Europe, and elsewhere that had once been central to Citigroup's identity as "the world's most global bank." The crown jewel of the divestiture program was the spinoff of Citibanamex, the Mexican consumer bank that Fraser herself had once overseen — completed in December 2024 after years of regulatory and logistical complexity.
The divestitures represented a philosophical break with Citigroup's founding mythology. Sandy Weill and John Reed had merged Citicorp and Travelers in 1998 on the premise that a financial supermarket — one that could offer everything from credit cards to insurance to investment banking across every continent — would generate synergies that justified its enormous scale. Fraser was saying, in effect, that the premise had been wrong. Or at least that it had been wrong for Citigroup, which had never managed to extract those synergies and had instead created an organization so complex that it couldn't even wire money to the right people.
"I will not sacrifice the right long-term investments in our growth and competitiveness for short-term expediency," she told investors in January 2025, when Citigroup lowered its near-term return target to 10–11% for 2026. She called the target a "waypoint," not a destination.
The Consent Orders and the Training Crisis
The consent orders hung over everything. Issued in 2020 by the Federal Reserve and the OCC, they required Citigroup to fundamentally overhaul its risk management, data governance, and internal controls. Fraser made resolving them her stated top priority. Citigroup said it had about 13,000 people dedicated to the transformation effort, with thousands more supporting it across the bank. Billions of dollars were invested.
But the problems proved, in the regulators' word, intractable. In July 2024, the Fed and the OCC fined Citigroup $135.6 million — a second reprimand that landed like a punch to a fighter who thought she was winning on points. The OCC said Citi had "failed to make sufficient and sustainable progress" in complying with its consent order and imposed new quarterly reporting requirements.
Internal documents reviewed by Reuters revealed the depth of the challenge. A December 2023 analysis tracking Citigroup's progress cited "insufficient compliance risk management skills" among staff working on the issues. The bank struggled with a shortage of skilled personnel and found, at times, that it did not have the right training and assessment tools to fix its regulatory problems. The analysis did not explain why.
The restructuring complicated matters further. When Fraser launched her massive simplification exercise in September 2023, some staff involved in consent order remediation were among those let go. Whether the layoffs set back the bank's overall efforts to resolve the consent orders is a matter of dispute — Citigroup denied it, saying that "cherry picking numbers will paint a misleading picture" — but the tension between simplification and compliance was real and unresolved. You cannot simultaneously thin an organization and deepen its capacity to do the hardest, most labor-intensive regulatory work.
This is the central paradox of Fraser's tenure: the restructuring that was supposed to make Citigroup simpler and more accountable may have, in some places, disrupted the very work that regulators demanded. The woman who built her career fixing broken things discovered that fixing one broken thing can sometimes break another.
The Hard Skill
Fraser's leadership style is, by the standards of Wall Street, almost aggressively understated. She does not cultivate the imperial aura of a Jamie Dimon. She does not do bombast. Colleagues describe her as methodical, collaborative, consensus-driven — a "disciplined strategist more focused on execution than visibility," in Britannica's characterization. She has no corner office at Citi's open-plan headquarters in lower Manhattan, where views of the Freedom Tower, the Statue of Liberty, and Ellis Island are, as she has noted with evident amusement, "ample compensation."
She has also insisted — and this is the part that most sets her apart from her peers — that empathy is not a soft skill but a "hard skill." Not an ornament on strategy but the substrate of it. "I see empathy as listening to clients and being in tune with your talent," she told Fortune. "You'll come up with a competitive advantage in the talent market or you'll be listening to your clients instead of pushing your idea on them."
The most visible expression of this philosophy was her decision, after the COVID-19 pandemic, to maintain Citigroup's hybrid work policy — allowing most employees to work remotely up to two days a week — while virtually every other major bank CEO demanded a full return to the office. Jamie Dimon called remote work an aberration. David Solomon at Goldman Sachs called it an aberration. Fraser said flexibility helps attract and retain talent, "particularly women and parents," and positions the company as a modern workplace. She held the line. In January 2026, she wrote a memo to staff that struck a different note: "We are not graded on effort," she told employees, warning of further job cuts and higher performance expectations. The woman who championed empathy could also be blunt about accountability. The two were not, in her formulation, contradictory.
"I can be more vulnerable in certain areas," she has said. "I don't feel that's in any way soft or weaker; I actually think it's much more powerful."
You focus on what it is your company stands for. You focus on what it is that your clients need, and you get on with the day job. [If someone says] you can't sell our bonds, you then suck it up.
— Jane Fraser, Fortune CEO Initiative dinner, 2023
The Results So Far
By any conventional measure, the turnaround is working — partially, unevenly, and with caveats. By late 2024, Citigroup had reported four consecutive quarters of year-over-year gains in revenue and earnings. Full-year net income for 2024 was $12.7 billion, up nearly 40% from $9.2 billion in 2023. Fee revenue rose 17%. Revenue increased across all five of the bank's main business lines in the fourth quarter of 2024. The bank announced a $20 billion stock buyback in early 2025 that sent shares to their highest level in more than three years. In the second quarter of 2025, revenue rose 8% year-over-year, including an 18% increase in banking revenue. Citi's stock soared more than 25% over the preceding twelve months.
Fraser's compensation reflected the improved trajectory: her pay rose to $42 million in early 2026, and she was named chair of Citigroup's board — an unusual dual role for a bank CEO that signaled the board's confidence in her direction. She also received a $25 million bonus.
But the story is not a simple triumph narrative. The consent orders remain unresolved. The $135.6 million fine in July 2024 was a stinging reminder that regulators are not yet satisfied. A $45 million block trading loss surfaced the same month. The return on tangible common equity — the metric that matters most to bank investors — remained below the 11–12% target Fraser had originally set, prompting the lowered guidance for 2026. Citi's stock, while improved, still trades at a discount to peers. JPMorgan Chase remains the gold standard; Citi remains the turnaround story.
And there are new complications. In early 2025, Citigroup dropped its diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, joining a broader corporate retreat from DEI commitments under political pressure during the Trump administration. For a CEO who had publicly championed pay transparency and workforce representation, the reversal — however pragmatic — was notable. In August 2025, reports emerged that Citigroup had engaged Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison to investigate workplace complaints involving Andy Sieg, the executive Fraser had recruited in 2023 to lead the wealth business. Citi praised Sieg's contributions but withheld findings of the review, threading a needle between accountability and continuity.
Fraser's self-assessment remains characteristically measured. "The best is still ahead," she told investors in January 2025. It is, depending on one's disposition, either a statement of faith or a hedge.
The AI Bet and the Next Citi
If the first phase of Fraser's tenure was about subtraction — divesting businesses, cutting layers, simplifying structure — the second phase is about addition. Specifically, about technology.
By 2025, Citigroup had equipped more than 175,000 of its roughly 230,000 employees with proprietary AI tools. Fraser mandated AI training for the entire organization. She deployed tools to speed up code writing for 30,000 developers. She pushed the bank into stablecoin exploration. She described AI, with characteristic understatement, as having "the potential to make tremendous changes."
Her philosophy on AI integration reflects her McKinsey training — principles-based rather than rules-based. "I like principles to help guide decision-making because I think it's hard to have entirely rules-based to guide people," she said at Davos in January 2026. She told her employees that the threat was not AI taking their jobs but "someone using AI is probably going to be better at your job than you are."
The human dimension of the AI push matters to her. At Citi's South Dakota operations — a thirty-year-old site where many employees have worked for three decades — she noted that workers had "had at least 12 careers in those 30 years." Half of all new job openings at Citi, she said, are filled by existing employees. "I want to stack the odds that we will help people reinvent themselves the same way as they have done themselves." The statement is revealing. It captures both the McKinsey analyst — the one who thinks in systems, probabilities, and "stacking odds" — and the mother who worked part-time while raising children and knows what it means to reinvent yourself in the middle of a career that demands full commitment.
The crown jewel, in Fraser's telling, is Services — Citi's transaction and custody network, the number-one such operation in the world. "We see opportunity both to deepen relationships with existing clients, as well as to acquire new clients," she told CNBC in May 2024. "Huge new flows in e-commerce. A lot of innovation in digital commerce. A lot of innovation in tokenized services." The bet is that Citi's global network — the very thing that had made it so complex, so hard to manage — becomes, in a digitized and AI-augmented world, its irreplaceable competitive advantage. The supermarket closes. The network remains.
The Caddy from St. Andrews
There is a story Fraser tells about being invited to play golf with Tiger Woods. She was born in St. Andrews, the home of golf. She had caddied at the Old Course as a schoolgirl. Her self-assessment of her game: "I'm OK at golf." The event would be filmed. She hesitated. What decided the matter was her son — then eleven years old. "Mom," he said, "nobody's going to be watching you. They're going to be watching him. And for the rest of your life, you'll be able to say that you've played golf with Tiger Woods."
She played. She has never publicly mentioned how she scored.
The story is revealing not for what it says about golf but for what it says about the calculus that runs through Fraser's life. The willingness to appear imperfect in a high-stakes, high-visibility setting. The pragmatic assessment that the audience's attention will be elsewhere. The child's wisdom that the experience matters more than the performance — and the mother's willingness to be persuaded by it.
In January 2026, five years into the turnaround, Fraser stood at the World Economic Forum in Davos and talked about AI and the future of work. She stood at CNBC's cameras and talked about stablecoins and revenue growth. She stood in front of her 230,000 employees and told them they were not graded on effort. She stood in front of regulators who had fined her bank $135.6 million and said the transformation was a priority. She stood in front of analysts who had been skeptical for years and said the best was still ahead.
She is still, in some irreducible way, the caddy from St. Andrews — the girl who carried other people's bags, who watched the game from the outside before learning to play it, who knew the course better than most of the golfers because she had walked every yard of it before she ever took a swing.
Somewhere in Idaho, a gas station sits at the junction of two highways. One goes to Montana and fly fishing and a weekend of normalcy. The other goes back the way you came — five hours, no shortcut — toward a job that nobody else wanted, in an institution that nobody else could fix, at a moment when nobody else had been given the chance to try.
She turned around.
8.
9.Use the book to get in the room.
10.Set waypoints, not destinations.
11.Protect the network; shed the storefront.
12.Be blunt about the scoreboard.
Principle 1
Take the job nobody wants.
Fraser's career at Citigroup is a catalogue of crisis assignments. The private bank running $250 million in annual losses. The mortgage division during a market-wide refinancing collapse. The Latin American operation still reeling from fraud charges. Each role was, in Korn Ferry's Jane Stevenson's description, part of "the blueprint" — but it was a blueprint that required walking into rooms where the previous occupant had failed.
The logic is counterintuitive. In most corporate hierarchies, ambitious executives seek out the high-performing units where success is easiest to claim. Fraser did the opposite. She sought — or accepted — the assignments where the baseline was so low that competent execution looked like transformation. The risk was failure, but the reward was disproportionate: each fixed unit added to her credibility as someone who could be trusted with the largest, most complex assignment of all.
"The most I've ever learned was probably in [the role at CitiMortgage] because it was a crisis and because I didn't know anything," she has said. The admission is strategic as well as honest. Acknowledging ignorance in a prior role retroactively frames the learning as the point.
Tactic: When evaluating your next role, ask not which assignment is the most prestigious but which is the most broken — the one that will teach you the most and give you the most leverage if you succeed.
Principle 2
Develop an elevator test for strategy.
Fraser's turnaround of Citigroup began not with layoffs or divestitures but with a deceptively simple exercise in clarity. "Could you describe what you wanted Citi to be, from a strategic point of view, in two sentences to someone in an elevator?" she has said. "And when I got that clarity, so much fell into place."
The insight is that complexity is often a symptom of strategic ambiguity. Citigroup's thirteen management layers, overlapping divisions, and matrix reporting structures were not the cause of its underperformance — they were the physical manifestation of an institution that had never resolved what it was. When Fraser decided what Citigroup would be (five businesses, globally networked, institutionally focused) and what it therefore would not be (a retail bank in thirteen countries, a financial supermarket), the organizational decisions followed with a kind of inevitability.
🏗️
Before and After the Simplification
Fraser's restructuring reduced structural complexity across every dimension.
Dimension
Before Fraser
After Restructuring
Management layers
13
8
Organizational structure
2 mega-divisions + regional overlays
5 business lines, each CEO reports to Fraser
International consumer franchises
14
5 (9 divested)
Strategic identity
"Financial services supermarket"
Global institutional bank + U.S. consumer + wealth
Tactic: Before making any organizational change, test whether you can articulate your strategy in two sentences. If you can't, the problem isn't structure — it's strategic ambiguity.
Principle 3
Treat foreignness as freedom.
"I'm a Scots woman running an American bank — a global bank," Fraser has said. "So I hope I bring some different things." The comment sounds like a throwaway, but it captures something essential about her approach: she has consistently used her outsider status not as a disadvantage to overcome but as a license to operate differently.
At Goldman Sachs, she was "the boring British girl" — and she used that self-consciousness as motivation to go to Madrid and reinvent herself. At Citigroup's Latin American division, she was the first foreigner and the first woman — and she used her outsider perspective to restructure operations that insiders had been too embedded to change. As CEO, she was the first woman to run a major Wall Street bank — and she used the "degrees of freedom" that came with looking different to champion hybrid work, empathy as a leadership framework, and public pay gap disclosure while her male peers defaulted to pre-pandemic orthodoxies.
The insight is not that foreignness is inherently advantageous. It is that the outsider's perspective — the willingness to see established practices as choices rather than inevitabilities — is a leadership tool, and Fraser has been unusually deliberate about wielding it.
Tactic: Identify the ways in which you are different from the institutional norm — background, perspective, style — and use that difference as permission to question assumptions that insiders have stopped examining.
Principle 4
Simplify before you optimize.
Citigroup's predecessors spent years trying to optimize a structure that was fundamentally too complex to manage. Fraser's insight was that optimization of a broken system is itself a form of waste. Before you can make something better, you have to make it simpler.
The restructuring she launched in September 2023 was not a fine-tuning exercise. It was a demolition and rebuild. She eliminated the two-division structure, stripped out regional management overlays, reduced management layers by nearly 40%, divested nine of fourteen international consumer franchises, and created five clean reporting lines to the CEO. The costs were enormous — thousands of layoffs, $1 billion in severance and restructuring charges, organizational trauma. But the premise was that a simpler organization could be held accountable in ways a complex one could not.
"We are being bold, we are ambitious," she told Bloomberg. "We are relentless in our determination to run the bank more efficiently." The relentlessness is the point. Simplification at scale is not a one-time event but a sustained campaign against the institution's natural tendency to re-complexify.
Tactic: When performance is lagging, resist the urge to optimize the existing system. First ask whether the system itself is too complex to manage. If it is, simplify it — even at significant short-term cost — before trying to improve it.
Principle 5
Build the skill that pays off twenty years later.
In 1990, a twenty-three-year-old Jane Fraser moved to Madrid to work at a securities firm and learn Spanish. There was no strategic plan that said "become fluent in Spanish so you can run a $40 billion Latin American banking operation in 2015." There was only a young woman who felt insufficiently interesting and wanted to acquire a capability that would differentiate her.
Twenty-five years later, that Spanish fluency made her the only credible candidate to lead Citigroup's Latin American division — the role that, more than any other, positioned her as Corbat's successor. The lesson is not "learn Spanish." It is that the skills that create career optionality are often acquired long before their value becomes apparent, and the people who build them do so out of curiosity or restlessness rather than calculation.
Tactic: Invest in building capabilities that don't have an obvious immediate payoff but expand your range of future possibilities. Language fluency, cross-cultural experience, and technical skills outside your core domain create career options that compound over decades.
Principle 6
Make empathy operational.
Fraser's insistence that empathy is a "hard skill" — not a soft skill — is more than a rhetorical reframing. It is a management philosophy with concrete operational implications.
When she maintained Citigroup's hybrid work policy while peers demanded full return-to-office, the decision was not framed as kindness but as talent strategy. Flexibility "helps attract and retain talent, particularly women and parents," she argued, and "positions the company as a more modern workplace." When she linked executive compensation to diversity and inclusion metrics, the decision was not framed as virtue signaling but as accountability — forcing the organization to measure and improve on something it claimed to value.
The operational dimension is what distinguishes Fraser's approach from the generic invocations of empathy that proliferate in corporate communications. Empathy, in her formulation, is not about feelings. It is about listening — to clients, to employees, to the data on pay gaps and workforce composition — and translating what you hear into decisions that create competitive advantage.
Tactic: When advocating for empathetic policies, frame them not as concessions to employee welfare but as sources of competitive advantage — in talent acquisition, retention, and client insight. Measure and publish the results.
Principle 7
Hire people who know more than you do.
This is Fraser's most frequently repeated leadership principle, and the one most directly traceable to her experience running businesses she knew nothing about. When she took over CitiMortgage in 2013, she had no mortgage experience. When she took over Latin America in 2015, she had never run a retail operation of that scale. In each case, she hired experts and built teams around them.
The recruitment of Vis Raghavan from JPMorgan Chase to run Citi's banking business in 2024 is the most visible example of this principle at the CEO level. Fraser has systematically brought in high-profile executives from rival banks to lead her five business lines — a tacit acknowledgment that the talent inside the organization, while substantial, was not always sufficient for the transformation she envisioned.
The complementary principle is equally important: once you hire people who know more than you, you have to let them work. "In the old days, it was about telling a group of people what to do and commanding and controlling," Fraser has said. "Today it is about how do you inspire communities of innovators. You have to shape the context for them and then let them get to work."
Tactic: When taking on a new domain, resist the urge to become the expert. Instead, hire the best people you can find, define the strategic context clearly, and then give them the authority to execute.
Principle 8
Manage the consent order — and the restructuring — without confusing one for the other.
The hardest operational challenge of Fraser's tenure has been the simultaneous execution of two massive, resource-intensive programs that sometimes work at cross-purposes. The transformation to resolve the consent orders requires deep investment in compliance talent, data systems, and risk management — work that is labor-intensive and unglamorous. The restructuring requires reducing headcount, eliminating layers, and streamlining operations — work that can inadvertently remove the people doing the compliance work.
The $135.6 million fine in July 2024 was, in part, a consequence of this tension. Internal documents revealed that Citigroup had struggled with "insufficient compliance risk management skills" among staff — a finding that was exacerbated when some consent-order personnel were caught in the restructuring layoffs.
The lesson is that organizational transformation is not a single initiative but a portfolio of interdependent initiatives, and the interactions between them must be managed as carefully as the initiatives themselves. Fraser's mistake, if it was one, was not in launching the restructuring but in underestimating the degree to which simplification and remediation would compete for the same scarce resources — specifically, skilled compliance personnel.
Tactic: When running multiple transformation initiatives simultaneously, explicitly map the dependencies and potential conflicts between them. Protect the resources dedicated to regulatory or compliance work even when the broader organization is being streamlined.
Principle 9
Use the book to get in the room.
Fraser's 1999 book, Race for the World, was not a bestseller. It was a McKinsey strategy book about corporate globalization. But it cited Citigroup as a model for global strategy — and that citation brought Fraser to the attention of Michael Klein, who spent years recruiting her.
The lesson is that intellectual capital, when it takes tangible form — a book, a published framework, a speech — creates pathways that networking alone cannot. Klein didn't recruit Fraser because she was charming at a conference. He recruited her because she had written something smart about his company, and that writing demonstrated a quality of thinking he wanted inside his organization.
Tactic: Create tangible intellectual artifacts — published writing, frameworks, or research — that demonstrate your thinking to the people and institutions you want to work with. The artifact does the networking for you.
Principle 10
Set waypoints, not destinations.
When Fraser lowered Citigroup's return-on-tangible-common-equity target to 10–11% for 2026, she called it a "waypoint, not a destination." The framing was deliberate. A destination implies arrival — a moment at which the work is done. A waypoint implies a journey that continues.
This is the language of someone who understands that institutional transformation is not a project with an end date but a process that must be sustained over years, potentially decades. The consent orders may be resolved. The return targets may be met. But the work of running a simpler, more disciplined, more technologically capable Citigroup will never be "done."
The waypoint framing also manages expectations — of investors, of employees, of regulators — by acknowledging the gap between aspiration and current reality without conceding failure. "We all want transformation to get done quickly, and we want it to get done right," Fraser told investors. "As CEO, I will not sacrifice the right long-term investments in our growth and competitiveness for short-term expediency."
Tactic: When communicating long-term transformation goals, frame interim targets as waypoints rather than finish lines. This creates permission to adjust without signaling retreat and reminds stakeholders that the real objective is sustained capability, not a single metric.
Principle 11
Protect the network; shed the storefront.
The single most important strategic insight of Fraser's tenure is the distinction between Citigroup's physical retail presence — branches, consumer banking operations, local market infrastructure — and its digital and institutional network — the transaction services, custody operations, cross-border payment capabilities, and corporate relationships that span 160 countries.
By divesting nine international consumer franchises while doubling down on Services (the "crown jewel"), Fraser bet that Citigroup's competitive advantage lies not in having branches in foreign countries but in having pipes — the infrastructure through which trillions of dollars of corporate transactions, trade finance, and custody operations flow.
The AI and technology investments of 2025 and 2026 are the logical extension of this bet. If the network is the asset, then modernizing the network — through AI-augmented code writing, stablecoin exploration, tokenized services, and digital commerce infrastructure — is the highest-return investment the bank can make.
Tactic: Distinguish between your organization's physical footprint and its network capabilities. In a digitizing world, the network is almost always more valuable than the storefront. Invest accordingly.
Principle 12
Be blunt about the scoreboard.
In January 2026, Fraser sent a memo to Citigroup's 230,000 employees that contained a sentence that would have been unthinkable from a CEO who had built her brand on empathy: "We are not graded on effort."
The line was a deliberate signal. Five years into the turnaround, with improved but still insufficient results, Fraser was telling her organization that the era of credit-for-trying was over. The consent orders remained unresolved. The return targets had been lowered. The market still valued Citi at a discount to peers. Empathy and accountability, in Fraser's formulation, are not opposites — they are complements. You can listen to your people, champion flexibility, invest in their AI training, and still demand that the numbers improve.
The memo warned of further job cuts and higher performance expectations. It was, in its way, the most McKinsey thing Fraser had ever done: a clear-eyed assessment of the gap between current performance and target, delivered without sentiment, with the expectation that the organization would close it.
Tactic: Empathy without accountability is indulgence. When organizational performance lags, be direct about the gap, specific about the expectations, and clear that effort alone is not sufficient. The scoreboard matters.
Part IIIQuotes / Maxims
In her words
I think one of the things that has been so helpful was utter clarity of strategy. It was that simple test of: Could you describe what you wanted Citi to be, from a strategic point of view, in two sentences to someone in an elevator? And when I got that clarity, so much fell into place.
— Jane Fraser, American Banker, 2025
The most I've ever learned was probably in [the role at CitiMortgage] because it was a crisis and because I didn't know anything. I didn't know the business at all and so the leadership skills that you learn, you have to hire people who are better than you, who are more knowledgeable than you, you have to get the team to work together.
— Jane Fraser, on taking crisis assignments, CFI.co, 2023
I see empathy as listening to clients and being in tune with your talent. You'll come up with a competitive advantage in the talent market or you'll be listening to your clients instead of pushing your idea on them.
— Jane Fraser, Fortune CEO Initiative dinner, 2023
Being a mother of young children and having a career is the toughest thing I have ever had to do. You are exhausted, guilty, and you must learn how to do things differently. It was the making of me because I became much more 80-20 — focusing on what was really important — got good at saying no, and also became more human to the clients who also face many of these issues too.
— Jane Fraser, on being a working mother, PeoplePill / McKinsey years
We all want transformation to get done quickly, and we want it to get done right. As CEO, I will not sacrifice the right long-term investments in our growth and competitiveness for short-term expediency.
— Jane Fraser, Citigroup earnings call, January 2025
Maxims
Take the broken assignment. The jobs nobody wants are the ones that teach you the most and create the most career leverage if you succeed.
Strategy is subtraction. Knowing what you will not be is more clarifying than knowing what you will be. Define both in two sentences.
Foreignness is license. Being different from the institutional norm gives you permission to question assumptions that insiders have stopped seeing.
Simplify before you optimize. Improving a structurally incoherent system is waste. Strip it to its essential architecture first.
Build skills with no obvious payoff. The capabilities that create career optionality — languages, cross-cultural fluency, technical breadth — compound over decades in ways that cannot be predicted.
Empathy is a competitive weapon. Listening to employees and clients, and translating what you hear into structural decisions, is not softness — it is intelligence-gathering.
Hire people who know more than you. Define the context. Then get out of the way.
Simultaneous transformations compete for resources. Map the dependencies between parallel initiatives and protect the most critical work from the disruption of the broader reorganization.
Set waypoints, not finish lines. Long-term transformation requires interim targets that acknowledge progress without declaring victory.
Effort is not a grade. Empathy and accountability are complements, not opposites. At some point, the scoreboard is all that matters.
