Dive Brief:

• Citi is considering selling more stakes in its Mexican retail-banking unit Banamex while continuing to prepare for a public sale of its remaining shares, CFO Mark Mason said Wednesday. 
• “We are actively looking at selling some additional, smaller stakes as we lead up to an [initial public offering],” Mason said Wednesday during a media call on the bank’s fourth-quarter earnings.
• The bank closed the sale of the 25% stake in Banamex to Mexican billionaire Fernando Chico Pardo in mid-December, after the agreement was announced in September. 

Dive Insight:

The closing “happened a lot faster than we had forecasted,” Mason said Wednesday during the media call. The deal had been set to close in the second half of 2026. 

He chalked that up to the support Chico Pardo has as a business leader in Mexico, the strength of the bank’s Mexican retail footprint and “smart decisioning” on Citi’s part to maximize value. Chico Pardo offered 80% of book value, or about $2.3 billion, for the stake.

“That 25% tranche is significantly more than any first phase IPO would have yielded,” Mason noted. 

After agreeing to the deal with Chico Pardo in September, Citi received and rejected an October bid from Grupo Mexico to buy Banamex for $9.3 billion. 

Mason indicated Wednesday the bank is “moving ahead with further sell-downs and, ultimately, the IPO,” but declined to give specific timing for a public sale of the remaining shares the bank owns.  

“If it makes sense to sell down some additional, smaller stakes, we’ll do that,” Mason said. “And when the market conditions are right, we’ll be ready to take advantage of that from an IPO point of view.” 

In 2022, Citi said it would divest itself from retail banking in Mexico, one of 14 markets from which it sought to exit. The bank took a $1.2 billion loss in the fourth quarter related to the sale of its remaining business in Russia.

Like JPMorgan Chase executives Tuesday, Mason also warned against a credit card interest rate cap such as the one proposed by President Donald Trump. 

Asked about the effect the president’s proposed 10% credit card interest rate cap would have on Citi’s cards business, Mason cited a lack of information and said it’s “not worth speculating” based on what’s been made public.  

But, he continued, such a rate cap would restrict credit access for those who need it most and have a “deleterious” impact on the economy. 

“An interest rate cap is not something that we would or could support, frankly,” the CFO said. “Affordability is clearly an important issue, and one that we look forward to collaborating with the administration on, in terms of how we come up with a constructive and effective solution.

JPMorgan CFO Jeremy Barnum on Tuesday said the proposed 10% cap, if put in place, would force the bank to “significantly change and cut back significantly” its credit card business. He also didn’t rule out the banking industry taking legal action against such a cap. 

After a Bloomberg report this week that the bank is cutting another 1,000 jobs, Mason said he expects the bank’s headcount to shrink further this year.

New York City-based Citi ended 2025 with about 226,000 employees. Mason referenced the bank’s plan to cut 20,000 jobs by 2026 – which was issued two years ago – and noted Citi has “made headway” since then.

“I would expect headcount to continue to decline in ’26 and those outer years, as we make progress on our transformation,” he said. “As we continue to improve productivity and implement tools like [artificial intelligence], we see an impact, or expect to see an impact, on headcount.”