Citigroup is poised to make “significant changes” to how it operates as an organisation in order to meet commitments to its stakeholders.

The investment bank announced plans to fully align its management structure with its business strategy in efforts to simplify the bank's operations in a series of sweeping changes that will give Citi chief executive Jane Fraser significantly more say over the day-to-day running of the company.

To implement its ambitions, the heads of Citi’s five interconnected businesses – wealth, services, markets, US personal banking, and banking & international – will now report directly to Fraser and become members of the executive management team.

The scope of Citi’s geographic management will narrow to local-market client coverage and delivery, and legal entity management, while leadership of the firm’s geographies outside of North America are now to be consolidated under head of international Ernesto Torres Cantú.

According to Reuters, this move will result in job cuts, but the news agency noted that the number of roles affected and the financial impact remain unclear.

Citi has also created a new client organisation which it said would be responsible for strengthening client engagement and experience across the bank’s global network and businesses. The group will be led by David Livingstone as its chief client officer. Livingstone took up the role in September having previously served as chief executive of Citi’s activities in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Of the announced changes, Jane Fraser said she was “determined” that Citi would deliver to its full potential and that the changes would ultimately “eliminate unnecessary complexity across the bank”.

“These changes eliminate unnecessary complexity across the bank, increase accountability for delivering excellent client service and strengthen our ability to benefit from the natural linkages that exist amongst our businesses, all with an eye toward delivering on our medium-term targets and our transformation.”

As reported by Reuters, Fraser recently told a group of investors at a conference in New York: "We have taken hard, consequential, tough decisions here," and went on to acknowledge that not all changes were "going to be universally popular within our bank".

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