Chapter 4.2. Strategic Priorities
It appears that Citigroup’s management believes in a lucky number of five, so they also identified five strategic priorities:
• Expend distribution
• Transfer expertise
• Invest in people and technology
• Allocate capital to maximise returns
• Embrace shared responsibilities
To penetrate new markets and deepen their presence in the existing ones on the global scale, Citigroup plans to accelerate the pace of retail and consumer finance branch openings. It also intends to expand its capital market businesses and its electronic trading capabilities, along with an increase in the number of private bankers in the home market.
To manage Citigroup as one company, its senior management proposes to enhance the integration of its products and services. This should help the company to improve the way it serves its clients by providing insightful and comprehensive solutions. At the same time, transferring expertise should create additional value. For instance, the case of Banamex and US cards businesses clearly shows how the knowledge of client targeting and pricing experience from the United States was successfully mapped on Mexican market with corresponding product expertise. As the result, Banamex’s credit card business achieved growth of 50% in both revenues and profits in 2005.
Citigroup also aims to consolidate commonly used systems and standardise the processes across the company. This should enable better interaction with the clients independently of the business they are doing with Citigroup. The company emphasise on attracting and developing the best talent by providing long-term training programmes to its employees and providing them with unparalleled career opportunities.
As to capital distribution, Citigroup’s strategy is to [re-]locate it to most profitable businesses, as it did in 2005, by selling its considerable stake in a Japanese financial company Nikko Cordial and placed it by investing into Nikko Citigroup Ltd, its securities business in the country of the rising sun.
From 2005, Citigroup also started an internal campaign of three shared responsibilities explained in the following section.