Citi executives said its wealth division is making “excellent progress” under Andy Sieg, the firm’s head of wealth. The division reported a 489% surge in its new investment assets in the fourth quarter.
Citi reported $16.5 billion in net new investment assets for the last quarter of 2024. That metric, which evaluates wealth managers’ performance independently of market fluctuations, contributed to a 24% increase in revenue for the megabank’s wealth division, reaching $2.1 billion (excluding interest expenses).
Citi began reporting net new investment assets in the fourth quarter 2024, citing it as part of a “strategic priority for the Wealth business to accelerate growth in Client Investment Assets and the associated investment revenue,” according to a footnote in its quarterly earnings presentation. That metric includes dividends and interest payments but excludes market gains, fees and commissions.
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The wealth division reported an organic growth rate of 11% over the last 12 months, which it defines as the sum of net new investment assets for each quarter from the second quarter of 2024 through the first quarter 2025, divided by client investment assets from the first quarter of 2024.
In a call with analysts Wednesday, Citi CEO Jane Fraser said the wealth division has “real horsepower and firepower in our investment capabilities” thanks to investments in improved client experiences and technology at the firm.
Last year, Fraser said during a second-quarter earnings call that the company is working to address “decades of underinvestment” in Citi’s infrastructure. Speaking at Bank of America’s Securities Financial Services Conference in February, Sieg said that technology in Citi’s wealth division has been a “limiting factor.”
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“The Citi-wide focus on topics like data and our overall technology architecture … creates a tailwind for us, which is a good starting point,” Sieg said. “We’ve got partners like Palantir and Google and Snowflake around our cloud architecture that are putting us in position to make progress, we think, in months, which once in my career would have been years of progress to move the platforms forward.”
Despite the firm’s renewed interest in improving its technology infrastructure, the wealth division reported lower technology expenses overall in the first quarter.