New Citigroup team to manage big-client relations

NEW YORK, May 6 - Citigroup Inc, aiming to coordinate its complex and far-flung businesses with its top customers better, is setting up a group to manage client relationships in corporate and investment banking, according to an internal memo obtained by Reuters.

Citigroup is working to right itself after racking up more than $90 billion of credit losses and writedowns since 2007.

The new team, known as the senior strategic advisory group, will be coordinated by Leon Kalvaria, global head of consumer and healthcare investment banking.

The group will initially consist of five bankers who will manage Citigroup's relationships with its largest clients, an issue the bank has been struggling with for years.

The U.S. government's stress tests revealed this week that Citi needs to boost its capital by about another $5 billion, a person familiar with the matter has said.

Chief Executive Vikram Pandit has been working to stem the losses, sell bad assets, and improve the performance of the bank's main assets. Part of that effort is aimed at getting different parts of the bank to work with one another better.

Charles Prince, who stepped down as CEO a month before Pandit took the reins in late 2007, also tried to stitch the bank's segments together better. Citigroup was put together over the course of two decades from a series of acquisitions.

In December, Citigroup combined corporate and investment banking businesses. In early 2008, Citigroup began assigning relationship managers to each of its 100 biggest clients globally.

Citigroup sells myriad products to clients globally, and although sales people inside the bank are supposed to coordinate with one another, customers have referred to the array of Citi people they work with as the "Citi swarm."

The other members of the senior strategic advisory group are Steve Volk, a Citi vice chairman; Alberto Cribiore, vice chairman of Citi's institutional clients group; Panfilo Tarantelli, European chairman of global banking; and Robert Swannell, vice chairman of Citi Europe.

Efforts to improve relationship management have been spearheaded by John Havens, head of the institutional clients group, which includes corporate and investment banking, sales and trading, global transaction services, among other businesses.

When Pandit worked at Morgan Stanley earlier this decade, he developed and implemented a similar plan to improve relationship management.