Now Citi's big financial data hire has found a new job
If you've been paying attention, you'll know that Citi has some issues with its data and that despite attempts at remediating them, the bank was fined a further $136m last year after the regulator unearthed issues relating to its commercial loans data.
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In the wake of that fine, Anand Selvaskari, Citi's not universally popular COO, ceded direct control of the data team to Tim Ryan, a former PWC Partner who joined last summer. Now, it seems that one of Citi's pre-Ryan big data hires is moving on.
David Zimmerman, who joined Citi's New York office in February 2021 as head of data transformation program delivery, and whom we heralded at the time as a hefty hire, has left again.
Writing on LinkedIn, Zimmerman said December was his last month at Citi and that his time at the bank had been "incredibly rewarding" thanks to all the bank's "talented, dedicated, and resilient people." Citi's data transformation is a "massive endeavour," Zimmerman added. The effort that's gone into it "cannot be overstated."
Zimmerman has already got a new job. He's going to be chief data and analytics officer for the Americas at Sumitomo. He has a fine pedigree, having done data roles at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Millennium and KPMG before endeavouring to transform Citi.
Zimmerman is one of several data professionals to try their hands at Citi, and to then leave again. Kathleen Martin, an interim data transformation chair who joined the bank from JPMorgan, is suing Citi and says that Selva asked her to misrepresent how well Citi's data transformation effort was going. (Citi, in turn, claims that Martin was dogmatic and inexperienced.) Rob Casper, Citi's former global data transformation chair, left in May 2023. who joined in 2023 as an MD, left again less than a year later and is now at Deutsche Bank.
Citi declined to comment and Zimmerman didn't respond to a request to comment on his exit. Citi is spending $250m+ to resolve its troublesome data issues and was looking for 300 data professionals in September.
Late last year, a group of mysterious former Citi MDs complained about bonuses paid to Selva and around 250 members of his team.
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