I have been with Citi for less than 2 years. I came from a top bank. Have more than 10y experience across different banks and financial technologies companies. I have never came across such a sh-t show when it comes to hardware / software. It makes sense to cut jobs in Tech - something is not working. I work in Risk, so non-vital function. I am afraid to think how are things going in front office tech :D
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Efficient banks tend to rationalize applications, centralize functions & support, and develop around standard data & processes. Citi operates with a plethora of applications and standards, many acquired decades ago. Due to a zig-zag culture with periods of spending too much then mass layoffs, change is slow to come. Consistent levels of investment in technology are necessary to really change Citi.
To make an actual change, you need investment in technology and right management. Adopt tech and infrastructure that can provide seamless support instead of bandaging broken systems. Layoffs only temporarily masks the issue in terms of stock prices and exaggerates the issue in reality. But who cares about opinions of those who actually can bring change. We just gotta shut up or get laid off
OP here - for all the people below, explaining how Citi is a behemoth and that is why it is so difficult to have proper tech - I have worked in another top banks/fintechs/etc. with 50k+ employees on 5 continents - never experienced such issues. Sorry, it is not about scale, just quality (or lack of) of people.
Simple example of how Citi technology bad:
They use program called Auditor on all servers and it is dysfunctional for half year already. Imagine process running with 100 cpu on all bank machines (probably hundreds of thousands) for all sectors and datacenters which is doing pretty much nothing - only produce heat and eating electricity.
Anticipate dysfunction?! This place has been a burning clown car rolling downhill into a field of dumpster fires for ages now. I’ll miss the people I’ve been supporting but the dying hardware and poor decisions when it comes to technology strategy, I can’t wait to leave that all behind.
Citi is a monster to support. There are teams already spread out across the regions that have 2 - 5 people supporting technologies that impact all the hundreds of thousands of global workforce. Imagine they start laying off out of those teams, it will end up being even less and given how the selection is happening, they might lay off the one or two who are subject matter experts and leave someone who might be clueless.
I've worked at companies were things work better and it's because most of the team's support scopes are local and not global and not at this scale and magnitude.
Most tech systems are already well out of date, unreliable and not fit for purpose.
How can this be fixed?
Tech is not just that. I would say that side of tech is clearly underemployed or outsourced, because there’s roughly a few ppl counted w the fingers on my hand to support a whole office that I think houses several thousand people. Then there’s the whole cloud, cybersecurity, infrastructure, etc that seem pretty slim already. The more robust teams seem to be the software development w all the contractors and consultants. If they plan to cut these functions more if you think it’s bad now, anticipate full blown dysfunction later on. I work on one of these teams and ever since I have started I have been drowning supporting a 240,000 people organization with the amount of people we have on our team.