Citibank 2015 Annual Report Download - page 5

Michael L. Corbat
Chief Executive Officer
pace not just with our competitors
but with our clients and customers
by prioritizing the rapid digitization,
mobilization and seamless connectivity
of basic financial transactions.
We are investing in our U.S. Credit Card
business and positioning it for greater
and faster growth. A significant sign
of the success of that strategy was
our announcement that we would be
partnering with Visa to be the exclusive
issuer of a co-branded credit card
available to more than 50 million Costco
members. Citi worked with Android Pay,
Apple Pay and Samsung Pay to make
mobile payment solutions available
to U.S. customers and teamed with
MasterCard to expand global acceptance
of the Citi MasterPass digital wallet.
And we continue to satisfy the desire
of many of our customers for a more
modern physical retail experience by
launching Smart Banking® branches in
a number of high-growth urban centers
around the world. To accelerate this
mobile-first approach, we established a
new unit, Citi FinTech, to consolidate and
concentrate the efforts we devote to the
rapid development of a radically simple,
connected mobile banking solution.
In our Institutional Clients Group, we
intend to build on our market share gains
by continuing to focus on a comparatively
smaller number of multi-national
corporations, financial institutions,
asset managers, hedge funds, private
equity firms and public sector entities
with sophisticated needs for wholesale
banking products and services.
Last year, we also helped facilitate a
number of landmark transactions, several
of them record-setting. These included
First Data Corporation’s $2.8 billion initial
public offering, a $34 billion acquisition
financing package on behalf of Teva
Pharmaceutical Industries (the second
largest loan of the year), and our longtime
client General Electric Company’s $36
billion debt exchange offer, the largest
transaction of its kind in history.
result in light of the fact that we only
began to return meaningful capital to
shareholders after passing CCAR last
year. We remain committed to achieving
an ROTCE in excess of 10 percent.
Many of our efforts in recent years have
been to set us up to focus on the future
of our two principal businesses. In 2015
we began to shift our strategic posture
from defense to offense in a number of
areas, markets and businesses critical
for future growth. While we remain in
a difficult environment, through our
expense discipline we are creating the
capacity to make targeted investments
in businesses that are well positioned to
drive revenue growth.
In our Global Consumer Bank, we
continue to focus our footprint by exiting
a number of markets where we couldn’t
see a clear path to achieving a rate of
return our investors expect and deserve.
We are concentrating our physical
presence in high-impact locations in
leading urban centers. We are keeping
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