Citi has quietly cut 7,000 jobs this year. It still has 9,000 more people than before the consent order

Citi has not been doing badly. Despite a minor hiccup this week, its share price has risen nearly 200% since the start of 2023. In the words of CEO Jane Fraser, Citi is "back in the game." Citi just turned its best quarterly revenues for over a decade, Fraser added. It is playing "offensive." It is on the "front foot." Citi will be investing and hiring. 

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Citi declared its investing and hiring intentions at the time of its Investor Day in May. As per the chart below, presented then by CFO Gonzalo Luchetti, the bank intends to make "cumulative incremental investments" between 2026 and 2028 of $5bn. "We have elevated Citi into a new growth mode," explained Fraser on Tuesday.

Source: Citi

They new growth mode also implies hiring. It also implies firing. As Citi adds talent for its elevation in areas like banking, wealth and prime finance, it's also cutting jobs elsewhere. Since Q4 2025, Citi has removed 7,000 people. 5,000 went in the second quarter alone. It now employs 219,000 people in total. So far this year, Citi has spent $800m on severance payments, implying that unwanted people are getting an average of $114k each. This is down from the apparent $250k Citi was paying in severance in Q1.

Who is being severed? Many of the disappearing jobs fall under Citi's "corporate other" expense line and involve people employed to work on the transformation of the bank after it was rapped by regulators in 2020. Between the fourth quarter of 2020 and the fourth quarter of 2022, Citi's headcount went from 210,000 to 240,000 people as it added everyone from data experts to project managers. Now it's cutting some of these people back again. Citi hasn't stated that it wants to cut all the transformation headcount it added, but it still has 9,000 more employees than when the transformation began six years ago.

Speaking on Tuesday, Jane Fraser reiterated that Citi's remediation efforts relating to its regulatory consent orders are now 90% done. Fraser declined to say whether the remediation efforts are actually 99% done, but she said the bank is "largely now operating at the Citi target state." Much of the consent order work has now been validated by auditors, said Fraser. All that remains is the pesky [our word] data governance and regulatory reporting work which has always been the core issue and which departed CFO Mark Mason said in 2024 involved 30 critical regulatory reports, of which a single one had 750,000 lines of code. 

Fraser also declined to say on Tuesday when this consent order work might finally be put to bed. This is partly because doing so is "fully at the discretion of our regulators" and indirectly the US government, with whom Fraser is popular. However, Luchetti said the spending on transformation - half of which is buried in the "corporate other" line of the accounts and which peaked at $3.3bn, is already coming down.

As it does so, Citi will cut more costs and presumably more jobs. Operating costs in "corporate other" were $977m in the second quarter of 2026, versus $469m in the fourth quarter of 2020 before the consent work began. The "corporate other" costs were down only 1% in Q2 2026 versus the same quarter a year before. 

Citi needs to get this cost line down. Luchetti said the bank is trimming the portion of the transformation costs relating to the consent order tat "temporary." It's not just cutting transformation staff, though. It's also having a "structural efficiency push" relating to technology and automation and has mapped "more than 100 processes for automation."

The people engaged in this cost cutting include Fraser herself, COO Anand "Selva" Selvakesari and the nice guy from PWC Tim Ryan. Fraser said they meet together every week to tackle the issue.

On some measures, Citi has already made all its cuts. In late 2023, it said it wanted to be down to 180,000 people by the end of 2026. When its nearly 39,000 Banamex employees are included, it's nearly at this number already.

However, it's not inconceivable that the meetings between Fraser, Selva and Ryan could result in job cuts before the end of the year. Fraser said on Tuesday that Citi may "take more severance in the second half," but declined to comment on how much. Some insiders are whispering about the potential for layoffs in the data group before year end, and before bonuses are paid. 

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