What's going on with Citi's M&A business?
If you want to work in M&A at Citi, Citi is hiring. Some of the $5bn the bank is investing between now and 2028 is going to "banking hires in key sectors and geographies." There have been some recent big recruits, like William Mansfield from Deutsche Bank to run M&A in the UK and EMEA, or Stuart Ord - also from Deutsche Bank - to run M&A in the UK specifically.
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This year's big hires follow last year hires. Across investment banking as a whole (M&A, ECM and DCM), Citi has hired 60 managing directors from 20 banks since the start of 2025. Last year's recruits included people like Guillermo Baygual as co-head of M&A from JPMorgan, for example.
Further hires are needed, Citi wants to increase its senior banker numbers by 15%. It aspires to add new sector-focused bankers to cover healthcare, industrials, technology and sponsors clients. Head of the investment bank, Vis Raghavan said in May that he can get whoever he wants. Many of the hires he gets are loyal to Raghavan himself. Baygual, for example, received a promotion when he joined.
On some measures, Citi's retooled M&A team is doing very well indeed. In the first half of 2026, M&A advisory revenues at the bank reached their highest level ever. This is something to be celebrated.
But are a few red flags too.
The biggest of these is the fact that while Citi's M&A revenues are increasing, they are doing so by less than rivals.' First half M&A revenues at Citi were up 7.4% year-on-year. At Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley, they were up 46%, 48%, 61% and 55% respectively. In the second quarter, Citi's M&A revenues actually fell by 4% year-on-year; rivals' rose by double digits in percentage terms.
Citi's underperformance is reflected in its rank. Year to date in 2026, Dealogic says Citi ranks 8th for M&A revenues. This is the lowest it's been since 2018.
What's going on? It may simply be a temporary blip: Citi CEO Jane Fraser stressed this week that Citi is playing the long game. It could be that Citi's comparable Q2 in 2025 was an unusually strong one for M&A fees (which is what the bank suggested itself in its results). Maybe it's that just Citi doesn't have nearly enough senior bankers (which is what Vis Raghavan himself suggested at investor day).
It could be something else, too. Since Raghavan arrived, Citi's M&A business has been through changes that have included bringing its M&A bankers under its coverage group and creating new heads of global investment banking in the form of Dorothee Blessing, Kevin Foley and Jared Kaye. Several senior Citi bankers have left, including Phil Drury, Anthony Diamandakis, Theo Giatrakos, Luisa Leyenaar Huntingford, Robert Farrington, and more recently and so far unreported - Hamish Summerfield - who joined Citi as global head of asset management banking in 2019. Some sector teams are thought to be bald as a result.
There are suggestions that Citi's M&A business might be suffering from instability and that the new hires will take a while to bed in. "M&A is a long term business and is about the franchise," says one senior banker with knowledge of Citi's business. "You need every sector team to work together and to perform."
Deals require long term relationships with clients. Goldman Sachs' CEO David Solomon this week attributed Goldman's own M&A success to having "an extraordinary number of senior people that have deep, deep trusted relationships with CEOs and boards across the corporate infrastructure." When clients want strategy advice, they turn to Goldman, said Solomon. - "We're finding ourselves in these discussions earlier and alone without other banks, and that allows us to command more of the wallet structurally."
Commanding the M&A wallet is important because M&A drives revenues across the bank. Solomon also said this week that Goldman's dominant M&A position is key feature of the bank's franchise. Winning in M&A drives fees across financing, hedging and wealth management.
Citi wants to win in M&A, too. The Wall Street Journal said in 2024 that Raghavan was embarrassed at how few investment banking deals Citi had been doing with financial sponsors firms and that he wanted to change this. Bloomberg said last year that Raghavan had been remonstrating with Citi bankers for leaving "wallet" on the table. For someone who wants to win, falling down the league table must be frustrating. The Financial Times said this week that Raghavan has "rattled" bankers during meetings when they missed out on deals.
Citi declined to comment for this article, except to say that it's categorically incorrect that Raghavan has rattled anyone. In time, the new hires may drive Citi back up the league table. "They need some better people," says one senior observer. "They've hired a few good people already but they could do with more talent."
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