First they make you work weekends, then they let you go. The other unfortunate job in banks
It's a well worn trope that junior investment banking jobs can be tough. Last year, for example, juniors on Baird's industrials team were said to be sweating through 110 hour weeks and 4am pitch decks. But another class of jobs in banks can also be miserable and they pay a lot less than being a junior investment banker: technology and data remediation.
Remediation jobs are intended to remediate. They are therefore time limited. And they can be stressful.
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One of the biggest recruiters for remediation-related roles in recent years was Citi. After it was hit with a consent order for "unsafe and unsound" risk and compliance practices in 2020, Citi's remediation recruitment went parabolic. It added 30,000 people in the following two years, many of them in technology and data.
Now, with the consent order work at least 90% done, Citi is expected to cut a lot of those people back down again.
Citi declined to comment for this article, but new CFO Gonzalo Luchetti said last week that the bank is cutting "temporary" spending on "transformation" which is included in its "corporate other" expense line. On some measures, Citi has already made all its headcount cuts: in late 2023, it said it wanted to be down to 180,000 people by the end of 2026. It's nearly at this number already when Banamex employees are excluded.
However, Citi still employs 9,000 people more than when the consent order began. And some insiders in the data team at the bank fear big cuts in transformation headcount are coming very soon.
When they do, they say they will be let go without bonuses and with a severance package equivalent to two weeks of base pay (excluding bonus, salary, overtime and other extras) for each year of service, up to a maximum of 52 weeks. A "separation pay plan" from earlier this year and seen by eFinancialCareers confirmed this. Citi declined to verify the figures.
With the end in sight, some of those contemplating their departure say it's been a long hard slog. "Citi are totally within their rights to do this, but it's not easy when they're celebrating but cutting the people who put in the long hours to accelerate the end of the closure [of the program]," says one. "We've just accelerated our own layoffs."
Citi's transformation staff aren't alone in experiencing this sensation. UBS is cutting 3,000 technology jobs after combining its systems with those of Credit Suisse. Inside ParadePlatz suggests there has been whinging about this too.
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