Citi on Wednesday named its smallest class of new managing directors – 276 – since 2020.
That tracks: The bank, for the past two years, has been reorganizing and trimming its ranks, with the aim of streamlining its workforce by 20,000 employees by next year.
Still, it stands in contrast to the 344 employees promoted to the bank’s highest officer title in 2024. That was the highest total in six years.
In a LinkedIn post Wednesday, Citi called the promotions “well-deserved.”
The new managing directors “reflect what Citi looks like at its best: people who raise standards, strengthen our culture and make the workplace better for those around them,” the bank wrote. “They will be instrumental in showing what a stronger and more connected Citi can do.”
In recent years, the MD promotions have represented a chance for Citi to highlight its nascent diversity. However, 2025 began with the bank abandoning its diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. Citi in February cited White House pressure as its rationale for dropping “aspirational representation goals,” except where required by local laws.
Despite that, the percentage of the new MD class comprised by women – 28.3% – is nearly identical to last year’s 28.5%. (That is, however, down roughly 6 percentage points from 2021.)
Citi in 2022 set diversity targets that aimed to put women in 43.5% of the bank’s assistant vice president to managing director roles by this year. At the same time, the bank aimed for Latino or Hispanic employees to inhabit 16% of U.S. roles between assistant vice president and managing director by 2025.
For reference, 12.1% of this year’s new U.S.-based MDs are Latino, Citi said Wednesday. About 4.5% are Black; roughly 31.8% are of Asian descent; and 54.5% are white, the bank added. That means 45.5% of the U.S. class are of a racially or ethnically diverse background – up nearly 11 percentage points from 2021.
Those figures don’t make Citi stand out, though. At least one of the bank’s peers – Goldman Sachs – touted roughly the same diversity breakdown when it named a new (biannual) crop of MDs last month. Roughly 27% of that bank’s new managing directors are women. About 31% are Asian (although it’s unclear whether that number represents new U.S. MDs or worldwide ones). About 4% are Hispanic or Latino, and 3% are Black, Goldman disclosed in November.
The 638 MDs Goldman promoted, however, marked the bank’s most robust class in four years. And the proportion of women represented a decrease from 31% in 2023 and the lowest percentage since David Solomon became Goldman’s CEO in 2018.
As for Citi, the greatest proportion of newly promoted MDs – 55 – come from the bank’s markets division. That unit is expected to finish 2025 having generated more revenue – about $22 billion, according to Bloomberg – than its other core businesses. The markets division’s revenue jumped 15% year over year in the third quarter, to $5.6 billion.
By comparison, 45 of Citi’s new managing directors come from the banking division, 40 come from wealth, and 33 are in services, the bank said Wednesday.
The decrease in promotions, by number, follows several years in which Citi elevated 300 or more employees to the MD rank: 304 in 2023, 331 in 2022 and 306 in 2021.
Diversity may be less of an outward focus for Citi in the Trump era, but the bank for years cultivated a reputation as a leader in that regard. It became the first U.S.-based Wall Street bank, in 2019, to voluntarily report the unadjusted pay gap between women and men, and among its white and nonwhite employees. It also was the first to name a woman as CEO – and the bank doubled down on that commitment this year by making Jane Fraser its chair, in addition to CEO.
2025 also is the year, though, that Citi announced that arguably the highest-profile Black U.S. banker, CFO Mark Mason, is leaving.
Singular events – be they Mason’s upcoming departure or an MD class of average diversity – are not trends, but they can become trends if they continue. It would be a shame for Citi’s long-fostered leadership on inclusion to grow stagnant.
