According to an interview with the global head of the new wealth division, Citigroup Inc. plans to hire 500 people over the next three years.
The bank started the unit, known as Wealth at Work, last year and tapped longtime private-banking executive Naz Vahid to oversee its development. Vahid has spent years leading the private bank’s law-firm group, which counts 50,000 lawyers and 1,000 firms as clients.
“We acquire clients when they have more debt than money,” Vahid said. “We get them when they’re early in their careers, when they’re not yet wealth clients, and they’re extremely busy individuals,” she said, adding, “We get them young, and we keep them.”
Vahid’s division is a critical unit of Chief Executive Officer Jane Fraser’s plans to remake Citi into a wealth-management powerhouse. The business generated $353 million in revenue in the first six months of the year — a 3% jump from a year earlier — and was the only one of Citigroup’s wealth operations that posted an increase for the period.
