Good morning everyone, and welcome to Citi's 2022 Investor Day. My name is Jennifer Landis, and I'm the Head of Investor Relations for Citigroup. Over the past six months, I've had the opportunity to speak with many of you, and I know how much you're looking forward to today's event. Investor Day serves as a natural opportunity to share and bring together all the work we've accomplished over the past year, and to lay out the firm's strategy, our financial targets, and our path forward. We have a clear message. We are improving our business mix, modernizing our operations, and capitalizing on synergies across the bank. We have a thoughtful and credible path forward, and we believe our strategy is in clear alignment with your interest as our shareholders.
Therefore, today's agenda is by design and ensures we address all of your questions, so you can walk away with a better understanding of who we are and where we are going. Today is an opportunity for you to get to know the management team and for them to get to know you. Now, turning to the day. Jane will start by taking you through our vision for the firm. We will walk you through the strategy of our Institutional Clients Group and our newly named Personal Banking and Wealth Management business. As part of today's presentations, you will also hear from some of our most senior leaders running our most strategic growth areas. We will also provide you with an update on our transformation efforts.
The day will end with a presentation from Mark Mason, our Chief Financial Officer, who will bring together everything you've heard today and summarize our medium-term financial targets. After that, we will open it up for questions. Lastly, thank you for your flexibility in the change to a full virtual format. As I'm sure you're aware, Mark and Paco came down with COVID, so we have pre-recorded their presentations yesterday, but they will join us live for Q&A. Thank you for joining us. We hope you enjoy the event. Now, it is with great pleasure and a true honor to welcome Citigroup's Chief Executive Officer, Jane Fraser.
Good morning, everyone, and let me reiterate Jen's very warm welcome to Citi's 2022 Investor Day. Although we had to change the format of today's event to a virtual one, here in the auditorium at our headquarters in New York, we're excited about presenting our refreshed strategy and our path forward to you today. You'll still get a good feel for our management team over the course of the day, and we're already making plans to come and see many of you in the coming weeks, because it's very important to us that we have the opportunity to connect with you in person soon. One year and one day into my tenure as CEO, and boy, does time fly, I can say with full confidence that this is quite a time to be a leader.
As the opening video highlighted, the scope and magnitude of the changes we're experiencing are happening at an unprecedented pace. When I look at these changes and the forces driving them, two thoughts come to my mind. First, Citi must seize this moment. Companies are going global at record speed. Indeed, many of our clients are born global these days. Digitization is creating the need for massive scale and greater agility. Business and geopolitics are so intertwined that they're creating an entirely new paradigm for multinationals. Add to all of that, society expects the private sector to play an active role in solving increasingly interconnected problems. This is the landscape, and these are the challenges that allow my Citi colleagues to shine. We are uniquely positioned for this moment. Our experiences and insights, our global network, combined with our local, on-the-ground expertise, and our empathy.
These attributes are uniquely Citi, and they allow us to serve our clients in ways that other banks simply do not and cannot. My second thought is that we have an urgent need to address the issues that have kept our firm from living up to its full potential. Let's spend some time on this. When I became CEO, I took the advice to have big ears. Our investors, our clients, our board, our people, and our regulators all have given me a lot of important and often tough feedback, and I made sure that we conducted our own honest and very candid assessment of our performance. What did we conclude? Importantly, what does that tell us about what we need to do differently this time?
First, in terms of our business, our mix is somewhat disadvantaged, and that needs to change to drive higher returns, fees, and growth. While we have several businesses that are true market leaders, we have others that have underperformed. We also haven't made the most of the natural linkages that exist among our businesses. On top of that, we avoided making some hard decisions, ones that cause some near-term pain but are the right ones for our shareholders over the longer term. I'm talking about decisions such as exiting businesses that simply do not fit well, and they make us more complex to manage and investing enough in the right places. What we now need is a more focused mix that builds on the connectivity of our core businesses. With it, we need a plan to grow in a sustainable way based on a new strategy.
Second, in the past decade, our emphasis had been on cleaning up from the financial crisis, necessary but not enough. More recently, we simply did not invest enough in elements of our operating model and technology and in the associated risk and controls, nor did we address the complexities of our organizational structure, and we felt the consequences of both as a result. What we need now is to become a simpler and better control bank with an operating model designed for the scale and the speed of the digital age, and one with a leaner organizational structures. Being simpler will also make us more efficient. Lastly, and perhaps most significantly, good enough was good enough for far too long.
What we need instead is a culture of excellence and accountability more fully aligned with our shareholders, and in particular, it means driving greater performance intensity and real discipline on execution and delivering results. This in turn, it also means changing how I run the bank, ensuring crisp decision-making and a rigorous set of performance and management processes run from the center. Now, put these conclusions together, and it's frankly not a surprise that we've been outperformed by our peers and that we failed to meet the expectations of our investors. What we need to do now, in short, is transform our bank. Today's agenda is accordingly shaped by these conclusions. But it's equally grounded in our vision for what it takes to succeed in the future. Today we'll go into details on the strategy and how we'll grow and deliver better returns.
Our strategy is based on a better business mix where we can realize synergies across our five core interconnected businesses and do what's needed to grow and to win in the decade ahead. We'll share more about the plan we're executing to modernize our operations. We're industrializing, making our operations fit for purpose in this world where scale, speed, and simplicity are going to separate winners and losers. We're prioritizing risk and controls and safety and soundness. Those are non-negotiables. We're setting ourselves up to have a flatter management structure and a leaner organization. The work we're doing on our transformation, which remains my top priority, is a critical part of getting all this done.
You'll hear about what we're doing to change our culture, to consistently deliver excellence, to become a bank that won't accept mediocrity, but instead be one that acts with urgency and greater performance intensity and one that drives accountability. Lastly, we'll show you the financial results we intend to deliver over the medium term. Everybody listening today knows this isn't a quick fix. This is a multi-year journey in which we will improve and deliver better results over time while also making the right investments for our future. Taking into account our growth path, the arc of the investments and the efficiencies that will come out of our work over time, we believe we can achieve an ROTCE in the 11%-12% range over the next three-five years.
Over the longer term, I firmly believe that executing the strategy will lead to a higher quality earnings mix, one that is consistent, predictable and repeatable. We'll be able to further increase our returns as a result. As you know, we've worked hard on our strategy over the last year. We've made bold, dispassionate choices about the firm we'll be going forward, and we've already made real progress on multiple fronts. I'm confident the plan in front of you is one we can deliver against. We're committed to being transparent and making it easier for you to track our progress with the relevant KPIs, and we're aligning our interests fully and financially with those of you, our shareholders. I am truly energized about what lies ahead for our firm, and so is this team. They are committed to being change agents.
They have tremendous depth and breadth of experience from inside and outside our firm, and they are driven. Over the course of the day, you will see the passion we have to succeed, the conviction we have in our plan, and the absolute determination we have to make Citi a winning bank. Now, we have a lot of ground to cover today, so let's get started. I want to begin with our vision for Citi. Our vision is to be the preeminent banking partner for institutions with cross-border needs, a global leader in wealth management, and a valued personal bank in our home market. This statement reflects a range of decisions we've made about who we want to be and choices we've made about who we won't be. It leans into our competitive strengths, and it reflects our aspirations for the future.
Let me take a step back and walk you through how we got here because it's been quite a journey. Global. Global is at the heart of our identity, the clients we serve, and it is central to our vision. Our ability to work seamlessly across borders completely differentiates us for any client that operates in multiple markets. All you have to do is talk to the CEOs of the world's biggest multinationals or the finance ministers around the world to know that this is what uniquely defines us. That's our starting point. Our global network means we have the ability to connect and do business in 95 countries using local banking licenses and our on-the-ground expertise. That includes an in-depth understanding of local regulations, politics, business, and economic conditions.
It means that we can move trillions of dollars in flows daily across borders, currency, and asset classes, an order of magnitude more than any other bank. Our network, it's highly adaptable to the needs of our clients. It evolves as we see shifts in demand, changing geopolitical dynamics, and new technologies emerge. It's seamless, it's connected, it helps drive a client's efficiencies, and helps them manage all dimensions of their working capital and risk holistically wherever in the world they operate. For many, it's simply indispensable. Global is more than just a network at Citi. It's a mindset. Clients choose to work with Citi because we see the world in a fundamentally different way than banks that do the bulk of their work domestically or just by flying in. Our people on the ground epitomize this.
They think in terms of providing global connectivity, and they know how to deliver best-in-class service wherever in the world they're located. Our global network and mindset continue to grow in importance to our clients. Fortune 500 companies are our sweet spot. We have business relationships with more than 90% of them, and they drive a high returning, rather nicely predictable revenue stream. Our network is also increasingly valuable to mid-size companies, including the newborn digital player just starting on their global journey. More and more, fintechs and our investor and financial services clients are leveraging our network to support their own operations. Let me bring the power of being the preeminent global bank alive in a couple of ways. First, with some more numbers. The work we do for Fortune 500 companies represents almost one-quarter of our institutional client revenues.
These are sticky and they're predictable. 85% of the network revenue we generate from our multinational clients comes from those that operate beyond the top 60 GDP countries where only Citi can offer a one-stop global network. As we take our clients global, we see significant growth in our revenues. Revenues are nearly double for clients that are operating in 11-20 countries compared to clients that operate in 10 or fewer. When clients expand their presence to 20 or more countries, our average revenue more than doubles again. These are pretty attractive numbers and multiples. For me, the power of Citi's network, its depth and its breadth, it really comes alive when you look at a country. Let's look at a big one, India.
In one of the world's most important global economies, we bank 30% of all multinationals operating in India, and we hold almost 30% of foreign investment assets. We support 8% of India's trade flows and process 6% of the country's entire domestic payment flows. We're also in the center of their new digital economy, and we bank more than 40% of unicorns in the country. No other bank comes close, and that is a power of our network for our clients and the countries we serve. That is why our vision for Citi is centered on global and with clients that have cross-border needs. With global at our core, we built from there, with an emphasis on businesses that benefit from being connected to each other.
That led us to the decision to focus on five interconnected businesses. Services, Markets, Banking, Global Wealth Management, and U.S. Personal Banking. Let me walk you through why these five and our ambition for each. The first is Services. Our services businesses are the heart of our global network. The wallet for services is quite significant. It's about $275 billion for TTS and $50 billion for Securities Services. These services generate incredibly sticky relationships with strong fee-based returns. We have excellent momentum in Securities Services, where we run the world's largest custody network and have recently won significant new client mandates. Our Treasury and Trade Services business is the clear industry leader. Our revenue with large corporates is more than double that of our closest competitor, and this part of our business is essential to our global clients.
You'll hear from Shahmir later today about how we're investing to further modernize our infrastructure and to continue to deliver the industry-leading proposition. Markets. Our markets business is a top four franchise globally. We're the No. 2 player in fixed income, and the investments we made in our equities business continue to deliver improved returns and results. However, as we think about the value of our markets business today, it's really important not to think about it on a standalone basis. Our markets capabilities are extremely valuable to clients we serve across the rest of the bank. In particular, there are very strong ties between markets and our services and banking businesses, and the partnerships amongst them generated $1.5 billion in FX revenues last year, and that's highly repeatable business. We can and we will strengthen linkages like these to enhance firm-wide synergies.
We see opportunities to grow share in the more profitable parts of the nearly $200 billion wallet in markets with a focus on where we can earn good returns. As you'll hear from Paco, one way to do that is to meaningfully improve our share of large episodic trades, which our banking franchise position us well to originate, and our global network and our scale position us to risk manage very effectively. We're going to continue to optimize capital usage for our markets business, so we address any future regulatory headwinds. Next is banking. Now, I'm pretty sure I'd win the argument that our corporate bank is by far the best in the world, and that is thanks to the caliber of our people and our network.
I hear this every time I talk to the CEOs of our clients who tell me how strategic a partner Citi is to them, how deeply we understand their business operations and their people all around the world, and how we often anticipate their needs better than they can because of the sheer depth and breadth of our capabilities in corporate banking. Over the last year, we've also made very meaningful investments in our investment banking franchise, and that's because this is a high returning capital-light business and is another place where we have both a strong foundation and a clear path for growth. As you saw over the last year, we're hiring more top talent, and we're shifting our investment banking sector focus to be more heavily weighted towards growth companies, particularly those in the industries that are converging, such as healthcare and technology.
We're working to deepen our relationships with financial institutions and private equity firms who are already major clients in our banking, in our markets business. We're expanding our work with mid-size companies around the world through our Commercial Bank. With the investments we've been making and the new client segments we're targeting, we are well-positioned to steadily grow wallet share in ECM, DCM, and M&A. You've heard us lay out our ambitions in wealth. Creating our Global Wealth Management business was the first decision I made as part of Citi's strategy refresh. Now, I'd like to claim credit here for having some real strategic insight, but really, I got to this decision by addressing the blindingly obvious. We already have all the capabilities we needed, but they were spread around the firm.
We already have a top five global private bank with a differentiated platform and a truly exceptional client base with an average net worth of $400 million. We also have one of the leading consumer wealth franchises and platforms in Asia, where, by the way, much of the world's wealth is being created. However, despite being a top three wealth manager in Asia, we didn't serve clients in the middle of that wealth spectrum, the clients that sit between the affluent consumer and the ultra-high net worth. That is despite us already having relationships with many of them through our commercial bank, which you'll hear more about today from Tasnim. Similarly, we have an affluent client base in the U.S. retail bank that was simply underserved in wealth products. We have all the capabilities for a differentiated and comprehensive proposition, the brand, research, advice, products, and execution.
We offer this in each of the major wealth centers around the world. We brought it all together into what is today a $7.5 billion revenue business with very strong growth potential. As Jim will show you, with this integrated approach, and by making some targeted investments in talent and technology, we can really grow our wealth franchise with some attractive returns. As we'd say in the U.K., this one's a cracking opportunity. The last of our five core businesses is U.S. Personal Banking. Given recent changes to our international consumer business, I've had more than a few questions about whether we should remain in personal banking in the U.S. Well, the answer is a definitive yes, and in fact, we'll be investing in places. Let me tell you why. This business serves 72 million customers and generates close to $16 billion in revenue.
That's about 25% of Citi's overall revenue on a go-forward basis. In the payments and lending space, we're one of the market leaders as the number two card issuer in the U.S. market, and it's a business that has generated ROTCE in the high teens over the cycle. We're at the forefront of this fast-digitizing and innovating industry. We offer the broadest array of payment and financing options to customers from proprietary co-brand and private label cards to installment loans to point of sale and post-transaction financing. As wholesale and retail payment chains increasingly converge, we're very well-positioned as a partner of choice. Our 40 strategic partners across a very diverse set of industries give us access to 200 million customers, sales touchpoints, and a nationwide footprint.
Our retail bank is a top 10 deposit franchise in the U.S. with a well-established presence in six affluent urban centers. There are valuable assets in this business. For example, it's an excellent feeder for our wealth business. Last year, it contributed 50,000 new clients to it. As you'll hear from Anand, we'll be smart about targeting the right opportunities to use those assets without trying to be something we're not in retail banking. These are Citi's five core businesses. Services, Markets, Banking, Global Wealth, and U.S. Personal Banking. They are interconnected, they're synergistic, and these synergies mean we can grow clients from the commercial bank to the corporate bank. We can grow individuals up the wealth spectrum. We can refer clients across platforms and deepen our wallet capture.
Together, they give us the breadth and scale to meet our clients' banking needs across products and geographies and throughout the different stages of a client's growth. We're focused on three accelerated growth engines that generate higher fee growth and are capital efficient. Services, Wealth, and the Commercial Bank. In Banking, Markets, and U.S. Personal Banking, we're focused on targeted share gains. Markets and Cards are the more capital-intensive parts of the bank, and today they represent a large portion of our overall business mix. While this proportion will shrink over time as we grow, we fully intend to remain a leader in them, and we will build on our strong track record for innovation, making the right investments to ensure we do.
Bottom line, our strategy is designed to center the bank in a mix of growing interconnected businesses that drive to higher quality earnings, improve returns, lower the cost of equity, and that position us for growth. To summarize our plan. One, lean into Citi's uniquely global network to be the preeminent cross-border institutional bank across our target client segments. Two, serve more middle-market clients with aspirations to go global through our Commercial Bank. Three, build a strong integrated wealth business. And four, grow and optimize banking, markets, and U.S. Personal Banking. In markets, focus on higher returning opportunities. In banking, invest to serve more growth companies. And in U.S. Personal Banking, continue to be a leading player in unsecured lending and get targeted value out of U.S. retail. I hope I've given you an overview of what we intend to do to drive better business performance.
Next, I want to talk to you about how we're hard at work building a modern, simpler, and more efficient bank. To get that done, we're strengthening our risk and controls, we're industrializing our operating model, and we're flattening our organizational structure. Let's take each one in turn. Prioritizing our safety and soundness and a strong risk and control environment are, as I said before, non-negotiables. The consent orders were a major and disappointing reprimand for a top firm. The issues they raise must be thoroughly addressed because our safety and soundness is paramount for our clients, our shareholders, and our regulators. The approach we're taking isn't one grounded in just remediation. Instead, we're using this as an opportunity to address root cause problems, such as investing in a new ledger, bringing in more top talent to our risk compliance and data teams, and automating our controls.
I strongly believe that getting this right will make us better in everything else we do. Later today, Karen will give you some color about the work we're doing on the consent orders within the confines of what we're allowed to disclose. Second, industrializing our operating model is a significant and it's a critical body of work. The scale and the speed of our business just grows exponentially with every passing month. In several parts of our business, we have led the industry in digitizing our platforms. Citi Velocity and CitiDirect are cases in point, with about 500,000 unique institutional users last year. That's unmatched by any other institution. There are areas where we have underinvested. For example, in our data architecture, in automating our operations, and in simplifying our end-to-end processes.
As you'll hear from Stuart, the work we have underway to make these upgrades will benefit Citi, giving us an automated, controlled, and lower-risk environment. It will benefit our clients too, because we'll get higher quality products to market more quickly, and our clients will have a better and easier user experience. Third, we'll make our organizational structure simpler and leaner. As we execute the divestitures over the next two years, we'll not only eliminate our stranded costs, but we'll be able to simplify our organizational structure in Asia and Latin America and at the global layer. Given my puritanical Scottish roots, it should not come as a surprise to you that becoming a flatter and a leaner organization is a priority for me as well.
We'll be able to do the forensic work to achieve this once we're further down the execution path of the divestitures and the transformation. We're working to modernize and to simplify. That only takes us so far. We also have to have the right talent and the right culture. When it comes to our talent, my focus is to ensure we have a team comprised of our strongest internal experts together with external talent who bring fresh perspectives and complementary skill sets. We've promoted our best leaders and change agents to two critical roles, and you're gonna see some of them in action today. These colleagues come to their new roles with remarkable depth and breadth of expertise from careers across different businesses, different geographies, different client segments.
They're operating alongside tremendous new leaders to the firm who are joining us from the best tech players and from our top competitors. Why are these leaders joining Citi? Because they believe in our vision, because they're excited to be part of this team, and because we're on a mission and they want to be part of it. I'm absolutely delighted by the caliber of talent we have attracted and the impact they're already having in technology and TTS and in banking, finance, risk, and the list goes on. I firmly believe in this team's ability to deliver what is needed to get this done. I'm proud to work at Citi because there are incredible elements to our culture, the global mindset, the real passion for our clients, and the fact we're a very human bank.
Having leading ESG practices is core to our mission of enabling growth and progress, and it's embedded in how we do business every day and the value we deliver. I also know that there are other elements of our culture we need to change, and we've already taken action in those areas. We're adding far more rigor and discipline around how we're leading and transforming our bank. I've brought more of our business leaders around my table, so they're involved in running the whole firm and not just a slice of it. We're managing against the metrics that matter the most. The metrics that we'll show you today, they're the same ones I'm using to track progress and to hold our teams accountable. Overall, we're instilling a new level of intensity and empowerment for everyone to deliver results. We're also hardwiring in more accountability across the firm.
We've updated our performance management framework, and colleagues will now be assessed on client and franchise contributions, risk and controls, and leadership. Importantly, except for control functions, all colleagues are also being evaluated on financial results with a greater focus on returns rather than revenue. We're increasing alignment of our senior colleagues with our shareholders by delivering a greater portion of deferred compensation in Citi stock, and more of our senior leaders will start receiving performance share units, which are tied to three-year performance criteria as part of their compensation. PSUs are now an even bigger part of my compensation. When I became CEO, I committed to acting with urgency. In fact, I told you there'd be no dilly-dallying, and we've made good on that commitment. As you can see from this slide, a lot of work has been done this past year.
Our decision to exit 14 consumer markets was a major step, and that decision has positioned us to focus on our core strengths and our competitive advantages, but it's also positioned us to simplify. I'm very pleased with how quickly this effort is moving. We've already signed deals in seven markets, and the Korea wind down is well underway. Mexico, let me spend a few minutes on this decision. It wasn't an easy one, but I feel very strongly it was the right one. Step back to our vision for Citi. It's focused on serving global banking needs and running connected businesses. Our mass market consumer operations didn't fit that criteria, but our ICG operations did.
We did extensive work over many months to make sure we could successfully separate the two parts of our operations and structure the exit in a way that most benefited you, our shareholders. We decisively moved forward once we knew we had a clear path that served those objectives. Now our strategy refresh is complete. Rest assured, as the industry evolves, we'll continue to review our portfolio on an ongoing basis, and we'll do that with the same rigor and clinical approach you've seen us use over this last year. Now we've turned our focus to execution. We're on a deliberate path. We're executing against a focused strategy. We're modernizing and simplifying our operations, and we're creating a culture of urgency and accountability. I have full confidence in our path and in the ability of this team to deliver improved performance over time.
I'm well aware that getting to the point when our businesses and our firm are delivering to our full potential is going to take a lot of hard work and perseverance. Our path in these early days isn't gonna be a linear one. Our transformation is a significant undertaking, and it's one that requires meaningful resources and investment. The shifts in our business mix will take time to show results. We also have DTA and legacy assets to contend with, and of course, there are macro and geopolitical factors that are outside of our control. Our medium-term ROTCE target of 11%-12% takes these factors into consideration. It also factors in our growth plans, the investments needed, efficiency opportunities, and capital actions.
We're being very deliberate about how we're scoping, prioritizing, and pacing our work so we can execute it well and swiftly, and I'm confident we will hit this target. You'll hear more today from the team about the key milestones and metrics to measure our progress as we go. As we make investments in our firm, we will be responsible stewards of your capital. We're focused on investing in the right opportunities and tracking those investments to make sure they're delivering what was expected from them, and we will return excess capital to you. In the longer term, as all the elements of our work come together and when we have delivered against the consent order, we absolutely have the ambition to grow our returns further.
Our maniacal focus right now is on getting to these medium-term targets and building credibility with you along the way, systematically, step by step. Let me conclude by reiterating, we heard your feedback loud and clear. We know there is a clear-cut case for change at Citi. I hope you've seen we're acting on it, positioning our firm's long-term future and tackling the issues that have held us back head-on. It is going to take time, but I'm fully committed to doing the hard work to get this bank to where it needs to be, and my team is too. Thank you for your attention this morning. I very much look forward to answering your questions later today. Now we'll hear about the institutional business from my partner, Paco.
Thank you, Jane. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining our Investor Day. My name is Paco Ybarra, and I am responsible for the institutional businesses at Citi. I have been in this job since mid-2019, and before that, I ran our markets and securities services business. I joined Citi over 30 years ago in Spain, and I have had a career that has moved me around the world with roles in Mexico, Singapore, New York, and London. Having now run ICG for some time, I've gained a good perspective on the strength and potential of our business, and I hope to be able to convey that to you during this presentation. We will start by describing our franchise today, the clients we do business with, and our recent financial performance.
With the help of my colleagues, we will discuss the future of the business and how we will create value for our shareholders. Along the way, I hope we will also be able to show how Citi has transformed into a more focused institution that puts the client at the center of everything that it does, how we have also connected the businesses in ICG to each other and to our personal banking and wealth management activities. Let me go directly to our first slide, which is a snapshot of our business. You have heard from Jane that our vision for Citi is to be the preeminent bank for institutional clients that operate globally and have cross-border needs. Why is this relevant, and why is this different for Citi versus other global or regional banks? First, you see that we offer a complete set of products and services.
This is the result of a deliberate strategy not to exit products or services that met core financial needs of our clients. We offer those products in the broadest set of countries with a long-term physical presence and the local knowledge that comes with it in 95 of them. Finally, we offer those products and services in an integrated way as a single institution, treating the client as one global relationship. This is the result of having learned to operate that way in many countries over many years, and it is a differentiated offering. Why is this so important? It's important because what we offer is precisely what our clients are increasingly demanding. Two very significant things are happening simultaneously.
First, large clients are becoming more global, and mid-sized clients are also becoming global in their operations sooner, including, very importantly, new economy digital clients who are also scaling up much faster. Second, the world's financial infrastructure is modernizing but not converging, making the financial management of a global business increasingly difficult. As our clients expand geographically, the complexity of their financial life grows exponentially with the additional locations, products, and services they require. That's where we come in for our clients. Our integrated global network and complete set of products and services simplifies operating a business globally. The integration, depth, and breadth of our offering creates value for clients. This is not easily replicable, and we see our role growing in importance rather than diminishing.
It's what has given Citi's institutional business such a strong competitive position, producing solid returns, and we believe we have significant potential for further progress. Let me try to elaborate on some of the things that I just said. We offer a complete set of products and services that cover the core financial needs of our clients. We do this across three different areas. In our services businesses, we facilitate our clients' daily financial lives. We help them pay and collect funds and optimally manage their liquidity. We help them hold, move, and finance securities. In markets, we provide clients with access to the world's public and private capital, money, and risk markets. We enable them to invest, finance assets, and manage risk in pools of liquidity across the globe. In banking, we address the needs associated with the biggest moments in our clients' lives.
When they go public or rethink their long-term funding strategy, or when they have to merge or acquire a business, restructure, or sell part of their business, we are there to make it possible. These areas address all the key financial needs of our clients, and we have a strength in all of them. Having a strength individually is not enough. As I mentioned, we offer those products and services in an integrated way, and this reduces complexity for our clients. That integration occurs on three dimensions. First, through our corporate and commercial bankers and our investor relationship managers, we provide holistic, coordinated coverage to our clients across everything that we do for them. Second, as you see on the left part of the slide, the majority of our clients do business with us across everything that we offer.
A strength in a particular area can be leveraged by us and by our clients to engage in other areas, creating a broader relationship. It is a natural synergy. Third, our products reinforce each other by being manufactured together. We have described those connections on the right side of the slide. They interconnect every one of our platforms to every other. Let me touch on some examples of that. We have very particular strength in cross-border payments and in foreign exchange. That is not a coincidence. Those strengths reinforce each other with our corporate payments business benefiting from the extraordinary liquidity in our FX business, and vice versa. It's the same with our banking and markets franchises. Our bankers have built a leading capital markets business, in part because our markets business ability to efficiently distribute client securities to investors.
Markets see greater investor interest because of its role as a distributor of primary flow created by banking. That strength in banking serves us as an entry point for services, and conversely, TTS serves sometimes as an entry point for banking. It's not just that the clients buy our products and services together, it is that they are naturally connected and naturally reinforcing as you run them together. We just said that our clients are becoming increasingly global. How does our network create value for them? The graph on the left shows the distribution of our clients' revenue as a function of the number of countries and products in which they engage with us. As you can see, the business that we do with companies that use us intensely across the network is a very large part of our business, and also the most profitable.
The breadth of our network sets us apart. As you heard from Jane, 85% of our revenue is made with companies that have subsidiaries outside of the 60 largest countries. Our clients do business in countries where we often are the only global bank offering services. This is important, but not just because the revenues we make in those countries are particularly large, but because we're uniquely capable of offering coverage to them in those countries. Many times they will see that as a key reason to choose us, not just for business in those countries, but for business across the entire network. This is a very powerful model for us. It gives us a differentiated offering.
Our expertise in bringing our clients to these markets without taking disproportionate local credit risk is one of the reasons why our risk performance in emerging markets has been very strong in spite of our presence in them. The network is critical. It is what drives profitability in our business, what makes our clients approach us. How does that network operate? How is it evolving? Is it a lasting advantage? Our global network is not some static or fading historical thing. It's constantly morphing and evolving as we invest and respond to clients' needs. The network was originally developed as a way to facilitate the expansion of multinationals that originated in developed markets and moved into other developed markets or into emerging markets. It had a west-east and a north-south direction.
Sometime in the 90's, that network started to be used by investors and financial institutions as well. We responded by adding capabilities, particularly in payments and securities. In the new millennium, we found that client demand was shifting to all markets configurations. It was not just about developed market companies trying to expand into emerging markets. It was also about emerging markets champions and new digital companies starting anywhere and expanding globally. We had to ensure that the network worked in every direction. What we're experiencing now is that the network is becoming very relevant for smaller and smaller companies that are born or become global very quickly, including many new economy digital companies. Over the years, our network has become multi-directional, important to an even larger set of clients, and more difficult for competitors to replicate.
It's worth stepping back and looking at how this business model, a complete set of products and services offered through the broadest network in an integrated way, has translated into financial performance. This slide gives you a snapshot of our business using average numbers for the last five years and comparing the largest financial institutions in the industry. Let me highlight a few points. We are the second-largest institution in revenue terms. We have a large and diversified deposit base arising from the strength of our services business, and in particular, our TTS franchise. Our business mix has delivered solid returns and a good competitive position through the cycle across very different macro environments. Very importantly, while we are in a solid position, it is clear to us that we have opportunities to improve that performance in absolute and relative terms across each one of our businesses.
Let me add to that some more specific information about our businesses. In Securities Services, we have already won a path to increasing share in investor business and to higher returns, and we are confident that we can continue along that path. In TTS, we achieved 20+% returns, and we think that we can grow the business materially while maintaining those returns. In Banking, we have been gradually improving our business and expect to continue to build on that momentum. In Markets, we're continuing the improvements we have made in our Equities franchise and are retaining leadership in Fixed Income while keeping a very close eye on returns and capital. We will give you more detail on these businesses, but for now, we want to show that we are in a strong and relevant position across all our franchises.
One thing that we want to make clear is that we use position as a proxy for share and relevance, not as a target in and of itself. Really, what really matters is being relevant, to be able to deliver what our client needs, and being profitable, not being mired in some sort of scale trap where the business cannot make appropriate returns. Today, we occupy a strong competitive position and produce solid returns across all of our businesses, and we think that we have an opportunity to do significantly better. Before discussing how we intend to do that, I would like now to present a short video from one of our valued clients, Blackstone, and show how we have worked with them over the last two decades globally to support their growth.
When you're a firm that's trying to expand globally, that's often difficult. You start by flying into a market, looking for opportunities, but you need friends, you need trusted advisors, and the fact that Citi is on the ground in every major market around the world was instrumental for us in helping us build those relationships and grow our business. That sort of local storefront they have, that network, it's invaluable. Doesn't matter if you're in Europe, if you're in the Middle East, if you're in Asia, Citi's been there. Latin America, same story. They have this unbelievable network. It's something that a firm like ours really prizes, and they provide access, they give us confidence, they provide capital markets expertise, all of that, so valuable as we try to grow and expand around the world.
Blackstone over the last two decades has moved from North America into Europe, Asia, Australia, and we have been an instrumental partner side by side with them and making sure that they see everything that we think they'll be interested in seeing in every one of those geographies.
Blackstone has taken three public companies with our name on it to the markets, and Citi was a lead underwriter on all three, and that is not a coincidence. Both our firm and Citi, certainly under Jane's leadership, has really focused on the importance of diversity, decarbonization, being a force for good, and I think that's another reason that our two firms do have this special connection.
It makes us very proud to see what we're able to accomplish when we partner with our clients, and Blackstone is a fine example of how we create value for our clients. Grounded in an understanding of value proposition, competitive position, and financial returns of who the ICG is today, we want to focus on where we go from here. Improving those returns is our north star, and it permeates everything that we do. I want to highlight three strategic priorities that can contribute the most to drive our business forward. They're all interconnected and will reinforce our ability to serve our clients' needs. The first one is to accelerate our investment in services. This has to do with leveraging the network and making sure that the strength that we have today remains and improves as the world continues to evolve.
Critically, we want to ensure that we capture the potential opportunity in full, which is something that we have not always done in the past. Our second strategic priority is to grow our commercial bank. This determination flows naturally from the discussion that we have been having. Our business fits very well with the demands of a growing number of mid-sized and emerging corporates. We have thoroughly tested this business in the last decade, and we have a coverage model and a risk approach that works. But as Tasnim will show, we're only scratching the surface of the opportunity. Third, our banking and markets franchises, we want to retain our strengths and keep positive momentum in the areas where we have room to improve. We believe we can do that while keeping a very strong capital discipline, particularly in markets.
We will use the rest of our presentation to elaborate on those three strategic priorities. We will begin with services. I will briefly touch on our Securities Services business, and then Shahmir Khaliq will give you a more detailed account of our TTS strategy. Our overall services strategy is to become a key operational partner for our clients as they conduct their business and help them grow and become more efficient in their business. In Securities Services, we deal with financial institutions, investors, and issuers, and we provide them custody, fund administration, middle office, securities lending, and insurer services. In essence, all the key things that they need to administer their investments and issuing activities. This is a critical component of our services strategy and a very good story for us.
Let me give you a sense of what we have been doing in this business and where we are headed. Our traditional strength in this business was direct custody and issuer services as well. Direct custody is offered to mostly other banks and custodians and leverages our unique custody network in 63 countries, the largest in the market. We lacked in the other side of the business, investors. We restructured and rebuilt our investor business, where we now offer custody through a global combined window in addition to fund administration and middle office services. This is now a very profitable business for us, which is growing and is well-positioned for the future. Very importantly, we have made significant progress in building our developed markets capabilities, USA, Western Europe, Japan, Australia, and we now have a genuinely global offering.
Our strengths have been recognized by some of the largest and most sophisticated investors who have been moving business to Citi. You see in this slide what that results in financially. Going forward, we will continue to execute our strategy. We will grow share one client at a time and leverage our strong overall relationship with asset managers and financial institutions to do so. We'll also modernize our infrastructure to improve our data and analytics services, as well as our client experience so that the business continues to grow. Let's talk now about our other big services business, Treasury and Trade Solutions, or TTS. TTS is the critical backbone that our clients utilize to access our network, moving money around the globe, and is a significant business with significant growth potential.
Shahmir Khaliq will now join us to present on TTS, and then after a short break, Tasnim Ghiawadwala will talk about the investment we're making in our commercial bank. After that, I will return to cover our banking and markets businesses. Shahmir, over to you. Thank you.
Thank you so much, Paco. My name is Shahmir Khaliq, and I'm responsible for Citi's Treasury and Trade Solutions business. I've been at Citi for almost 30 years, working in a variety of roles. Over the last couple of years, I've been part of the TTS management team, initially running operations and technology, and then overseeing the entire business starting this past year. Prior to TTS, I ran the direct custody and clearing business, and before that, the investor services business in North America. I have also had leadership experience in banking, in country management, and cluster management in Europe. In all my time at Citi, I've been privileged to manage and grow a number of Citi's franchises across our global network. A very warm welcome to you all, and thank you so much for joining us today. TTS is an extremely important part of Citi's business.
We historically have not put a big spotlight on TTS, but in many ways, TTS is the reason why we can call ourselves the world's most global bank. It's going to be a very important part of our future. I want to spend the next 20 minutes walking you through what we do in TTS, how it truly distinguishes us from our peers, and how we're investing in the business to keep it growing and delivering excellence for clients. Let's begin with a quick overview of the business. TTS enables clients to go global and help simplify the business of managing their treasuries, payments, and commerce on a day-to-day basis. We are a business that generated more than $9 billion of revenue in 2021, of which fees were $3.5 billion. Our average deposits totaled $664 billion in 2021.
TTS generated an ROTCE of 21% with an operating efficiency of 55%. Our client base is broad and diverse. 18,000 clients operating across 95 countries, covering more than 90% of the Fortune 500 companies. Large corporate, public sector, and financial institutions represent almost 90% of our total revenue. The remaining revenues come from mid-market clients, which we've identified as a significant growth opportunity for us, and we will talk a little bit later about how we're going to build up our position in this segment. The one thing I should note, our business is diversified and entirely global. There is no regional revenue concentration, and 75% of total TTS revenues are generated by large institutional clients that engage TTS in at least five countries across our network.
In the next couple of slides, I will walk you through building blocks for TTS along with our financial profile. TTS. TTS entails three integrated solution pillars: payments, liquidity management, and working capital solutions. We therefore are in the business of opening accounts, allowing clients to pay their suppliers and employees, collect money from their customers, manage their liquidity and working capital finance, and finance supply chains. You can imagine how valuable all of these services have become for our clients as the world continues to get smaller and more complex. An increasing number of companies expand beyond their current footprint. In fact, these days, companies, many, many companies, are born global. In most cases, we are the front door to Citi for large institutional clients, where we have nearly 10% market share.
Our clients typically come to TTS first to open an account and build out their business models regionally or globally. This is particularly relevant and important for the clients we service in the high-growth e-commerce and digital sectors. All combined, it means TTS is an important generator of deposits and fee revenues for Citi. We represent nearly 50% of the bank's total deposit base and have significant fee income, which represents about 35%-40% of our top line. In addition, in almost all cases, our clients will engage with other parts of our franchise, such as FX, where our cross-border payment solution is fully integrated, advisory or capital market activities, including capital raising and hedging solutions. Now let me talk about the core capabilities that allow TTS to be successful for our clients. Our capabilities span the three solution pillars that I talked about earlier.
With our on-the-ground presence in 95 countries and direct connectivity in almost every major clearing system, we have the largest proprietary payment network in the industry. This network connects into almost 270 value transfer systems worldwide, which is the last mile of our payment network. A payment that settles within the Citi network has the added benefit of richer data, payment tracking, and visibility, creating a superior client experience. As we expand our network to include alternate payment methods like mobile wallets and local instant payment schemes, we are enabling our clients to make payments as if there are no borders, currencies, or constraints. This network also naturally protects our clients against external market disruptions.
In terms of liquidity management, virtual accounts, notional pooling, and cash concentration are key tools to help treasurers simplify their operating models around cash and operational maintenance, and we continue to expand our offering to additional markets. We are also investing in our trade finance capabilities, which have become especially relevant during the pandemic as clients move swiftly to reconfigure supply chains and manage working capital cycles. All of these capabilities come together through our industry-leading, award-winning digital platforms, which include CitiDirect, which serves 90 countries across more than 140 currencies. We also have our CitiConnect platform, which operates our APIs, host-to-host, file-to-file client connectivity, processing trillions dollars of aggregate payments around the globe each year. These platforms allow us to provide data and analytics while connecting digitally into our clients' enterprise systems, thereby enabling long-lasting and recurring relationships.
As a final point, we believe this network, created over decades, is almost impossible to recreate. Now let's spend some time reviewing TTS's financial profile over the last few years. Starting with revenues, we have seen the resilience of the business throughout this low interest rate environment of the last several years. Indeed, if you exclude the impact of rates, our revenues have grown 25% since 2017. Fees have been an important contributor to this growth. Excluding commercial cards, which were clearly impacted by COVID travel, but are bouncing back very strongly, fees have grown 28% since 2017 to $3.5 billion.
A significant driver has been the growth of our cross-border business, driven by both clearing and cross-border payment volumes, including FX, with revenues increasing almost 36% over the same period from $1.1 billion -$1.6 billion. Staying at the top of the slide, as you can see, TTS has a diverse revenue mix across liquidity management, payments, and our trade business. Our deposit base has grown almost 45% since 2017. Net interest income remained flat despite a significant reduction in rates over the last four years. We expect that as the rate environment normalizes, in addition to fees, rates should also drive revenues over the coming months. We continue to manage our trade loan book very actively to ensure appropriate returns and capital usage.
While overall average book has been managed close to a flat at $65 billion, our clients are increasingly coming to us for supplier and receivable finance solutions, which have been growing at a 12% CAGR since 2017, and now represent almost half of our trade book. In short, the TTS business has been resilient and growing across the core drivers that we measure, and is positioned very well. Competition. The transaction services industry is a competitive space populated by banks and a growing number of fintechs. As I mentioned earlier, we are the market leader in the institutional segment, with almost double the revenues of our next closest competitor. That segment represents a $100 billion wallet, which continues to grow.
While we have considerable heft in the large institutional client space, we plan to replicate that in the mid-market segment as clients look to go global and grow their businesses cross-border. In addition to banks, fintechs are a growing segment of competitors. As you can see on the page, fintechs generally tend to focus in specific verticals across the full value chain. Where Citi focuses is on structuring solutions that serve our clients end to end across the globe in an integrated fashion. As a final point, I would add that our industry is unique. Not only do we compete with banks and fintechs, but they're also some of our biggest clients and partners. I will talk about our business model covering fintechs and e-commerce companies very shortly.
As we work with our clients to develop solutions, our ability to win is grounded in the following five key attributes. First, our length of trusted relationships. Second, our integrated offering across payments, financing, and the broader institutional product set that you heard about offered consistently across our global network. Third, our teams of talented professionals on the ground with unmatched local knowledge. Our experience and credibility with local market infrastructures and regulators. Lastly, having fintechs as both clients and partners have truly helped drive Citi's product offering to be truly best in class. Now it's easy to put that on a piece of paper, but let me elaborate with a couple of examples. First, a large energy, international energy company awarded us the mandate to manage their consumer digital collections in several European countries.
The incumbent was a fintech company, but we won due to our deep relationship with this client and the strength of our product offering, including not just collections, but also liquidity, financing, and analytics. Another recent example is our provision of banking-as-a-service to a large North American bank. We won the mandate with this client over multiple fintech competitors to make cross-border payments in 140 countries using APIs to create a fully digital, 24/7 payment experience for their retail consumers. I could give you more examples, but I thought we would share a video perspective of one of our largest clients and their experience with Citi and TTS.
At Alphabet and Google, we're always focused on our mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. Inevitably, that brings a lot of complexity. We're operating in new and often emerging markets. We're navigating various regulatory and operating environments on a daily basis. Citi helps ensure that our payments around the world are reliably flowing at the right time and in the right currency.
Citi being connected to the world's financial clearing systems enables Google to get their products and organizing information out around the world.
Citi was a really critical partner when we upgraded and established our global liquidity and in-house banking architecture a couple of years ago. The expertise at Citi, the knowledge of industry best practices, has really helped us implement a new structure that has streamlined our operations and resulted in more efficient working capital and cash management. The experience and global reach at Citi enables conversations that really sharpen our thinking and how we go about the execution opportunities, which we value greatly.
A big thank you to Ms. Porat from Alphabet for sharing her thoughts with us today. As we look to the future of TTS, we anticipate growth will come from existing clients and capitalizing on emerging opportunities. As I've said, we have almost 10% market share in the institutional client space. These are large and sophisticated clients who continue to grow their business, and we continue to acquire new clients. As a result, we expect to increase our wallet share by 50-75 basis points in the medium term. We believe that we're in a great position to win as we continue to strengthen our coverage and service model, continue to build more connectivity across ICG, and frankly, expand our banking-as-a-service model, particularly for fintechs and payment intermediary clients.
We also see new opportunities to grow our client base in the mid-size corporates, marketplaces, and fintechs that serve small and mid-size businesses, or SMBs, as they're known. We believe that many of these clients will become global at a faster pace and will be faced with the same cross-border needs in exactly the same way our institutional clients do. Over the past three years, we have grown more than 15% CAGR in the number of clients in the marketplace and SMB segment. We will continue our successful partnership with Citi's corporate bank and match TTS's capabilities to emerging mid-size corporates via our commercial bank. We expect that such a strategy should allow us to increase our current 0.5% wallet share in the mid-market space by at least 50% in the medium term.
To continue our growth trajectory, we're focused on investing capital and resources in five critical pillars. As a reference points, before I talk about those pillars, our tech budget for 2022 is approximately $1 billion, which is an increase of almost 40% versus 2020. First, we keep investing in the right set of integrated solutions, allowing, including rolling them out in key geographic locations. There are clear synergies between our payment, liquidity management, and working capital products, which allow us to serve our client needs end to end. Second, we believe client experience is an absolute must-win battle for us. For example, while we've recently won Coalition Greenwich's Best Digital Bank Award for the 16th consecutive year, we continue to roll out our reimagined next-generation platform and expect to have it completed in the next 18-24 months. Innovation.
This is critical to our commitment to choices and payment ubiquity. It is why we are actively involved in efforts around the globe, engaging with central banks on commercial bank digital currencies or CBDCs. In addition, we're developing proof of concepts in digital assets, including tokenization of deposits and on and off-ramp capabilities in order to provide network interoperability for fiat currencies and digital money. TTS is also continuing its push to connect with all major global, regional, and domestic wallets around the globe. Fourth, tech platforms. We continue investing in our infrastructure to make it far more scalable, nimble, frictionless, and resilient. This is critical, especially in a world where instant payments, 24/7, B to C and C to B are absolutely mission critical and key for our clients. Lastly, and probably most importantly, talent.
We have hired several seniors in the organization over the last few years, and we've promoted a number of Citi high potentials into leadership roles, while also adding senior outside talent with complementary skills. We feel pretty good with how we are positioned today, and as we look forward, we will continue to add forward-thinking competency to our talent bench. I would like to spend some time focusing on one particular segment and trend, e-commerce. Global retail e-commerce has exploded during the pandemic. As the go-to bank for e-commerce and fintechs around the globe, we have been the strong beneficiary of this growth. As I mentioned earlier, we continue to invest in solutions that are required by e-commerce companies across the entire integrated product spectrum.
In 2021, we generated close to $1 billion in revenue, servicing 250 of the world's largest e-commerce companies and around 200 of the largest fintechs. For both e-commerce and fintech companies, our fees grew at double-digit CAGR over the last four years. Our aspiration is to build on this trajectory, given how we see the industry and our pipeline evolving. We have also built out a new global e-commerce solutions coverage team at Citi, with presence across all the major hubs, and further strengthened our existing fintech coverage team. In summary, we believe TTS is well-positioned to continue to lead in the 21st century. We will continue to drive share with our existing clients while also adding to our momentum in the e-commerce and mid-market space. We continue to invest in technology and talent to maintain and grow our leadership in the industry.
That should result in sustained growth in fees, loans, and deposits, thereby generating high single-digit growth in our top line while maintaining an ROTCE above 20%. Thank you once again for your time. Now we will go to a short break, and when we come back, you will hear from Tasnim Ghiawadwala, our Commercial Bank head. Thank you.
Welcome back, everybody. It is my great pleasure to speak with you today. My name is Tasnim Ghiawadwala, and I run the commercial bank, which we call CCB. I recently returned to Citi after a three-year stint at another bank. Prior to that, I was at Citi for 21 years doing a variety of roles in investment banking, in corporate banking, and of course, commercial banking. In fact, my last role at Citi was running the EMEA Commercial Bank. It's a business that I know, that I love, and I was very excited to return to lead. As Jane and Paco have already indicated, the commercial bank is one of the key growth drivers for Citi. I'm going to talk about where that growth is going to come from and how we're going to capture it.
Let me start by talking about the business that we have in front of us today. We make revenues of $2.7 billion, and we've been growing this business very quietly, and I would say very conscientiously over the last 10 or so years. We have 1,300 bankers that serve 14,000 clients across more than 60 countries. We serve two core client segments. The first we call emerging corporates, which we define as companies with sales between $10 million and $100 million. The second segment we call mid corporates, which are companies with sales between $100 million all the way up to $3 billion. Together, these segments represent a very large and wide target market.
I always feel that when you've got such a large target market, the one thing that you must do as a bank is to answer the question, why Citi for clients? Because if you're able to answer that, then you're going to be able to have longer and deeper relationships with clients, which is what we all want. At the core of CCB's value proposition, or the why Citi, are three elements. The first is access to our ICG infrastructure. I am able to offer my clients all the same capabilities that ICG developed for the largest companies in the world. Just to pick a few examples that Shahmir talked about, like being able to offer notional pooling in 60 countries to this segment of clients, it's really different. To be able to offer 140 payment currencies, again, to this segment of clients is really, really different.
When I go and see my clients and tell them that they will have access to the same products and solutions as a Fortune 500 company, I just love to see their eyes light up. It's for this reason that we do not need to lead with lending. This is unlike a typical commercial bank that tends to lead with lending, and the term commercial banking and commercial lending are used interchangeably. The second element of our value proposition, and you've heard it throughout the morning, is our globality. Citi has an enviable near 100-country footprint, and we can provide this segment of clients access to this network, which again, is totally unique. Other banks try to emulate what we do through correspondent banking arrangements, but this is usually a very difficult client experience and doesn't compare to what we do.
The third part of our value proposition is that we can connect our clients to other parts of Citi. Having these multiple touch points, be it in wealth, in banking, in markets, or TTS, means we're able to look at clients through multiple lenses and bring clients closer to product experts so they get the best advice quickly. Now, we serve clients in a wide range of industry sectors through bankers that are increasingly industry specialized. Within these sectors, we target those clients with high transaction volumes, complexity, and global flows. That's when the why Citi starts to make sense for clients. The combination of these three elements, our platform, our globality, and our ability to connect clients, totally differentiates us from other banks, especially local and regional banks.
We've been scaling this business to reach $2.7 billion in revenue, supported by solid growth in our drivers. In the last five years, despite the pandemic and very low interest rates, we still achieved an average revenue growth of 7%, which we're really proud of. We're also able to produce very strong returns for Citi. Last year was a knockout year for us, where we achieved 37% ROTCE. If you normalize that across the last five years, we still achieved an average of 25% ROTCE. I feel confident that as we continue growing, we should be able to maintain our strong returns. Our risk model, shown on the bottom right chart, has remained resilient because we take a disciplined approach to our target market. Our credit losses average at around 46 basis points over the last five years.
Again, all of this against a backdrop of the pandemic and the worst economic headwinds that our generation has seen. Let's look at how our value proposition plays out in the numbers. The top left chart, labeled Product Mix, shows how the mix has shifted over the last five years. In 2017, 27% of our revenues were driven by lending. Whereas last year, lending revenues accounted for only 22%. What that shows is that as we embed the value proposition with our clients, revenues associated with solutions that have higher margins, like FX and CMO, are growing in their importance. The top right chart shows a similar story but looks at the average revenue per client. Every single year, we are increasing and deepening the relationships we have with our clients, evidenced by the growing revenue per client.
Moving to the bottom two charts again show the value proposition in action. The cross-border chart on the bottom left shows that 48% of our revenues come from clients who operate cross-border with us. This emphasizes the importance of our global footprint. The bottom right chart is just one example of a focus we decided to take five years ago. We created a sub-segment of clients that have a digital business model or are disruptors. Today, over 20% of our global revenues come from digital clients, which is just amazing and talks to the quantity and the quality of solutions we are delivering to these types of clients. The best part of my job is meeting clients. With commercial clients, the owners, they have such a passion for their business, and they all have a fascinating story to tell.
There is nothing more rewarding than a client acknowledging the part that you played in their journey. Let me introduce you to our client Flywire, a digital payments company. Flywire essentially built their business over the last 12 years on Citi's global infrastructure.
Our business was launched in 2009 with one simple idea of making cross-border tuition payments simpler and easier. Now, over 12 years later, we've publicly listed and have over 600 employees in 12 offices around the world. Citi has been with us since 2009 when we opened our first bank account. Our founder walked into Citi's offices and luckily got a meeting with Stephanie, who's been with us every step of the way.
I think the impressive thing is that Citi is able to open that one account, but then when the time comes and you need to access public debt, private debt, you know, any of the things that we do in the corporate and investment bank, we have those capabilities too. I view my job as to bring the globe and bring Citi to my clients.
We leverage Citi products like low-value payment processing, wires, foreign exchange to offer a seamless end-to-end experience for the payer of a transaction, but also our client who's ultimately receiving those funds. One of the things we love about working with Citi is that through a single access point working with Stephanie, we are able to immediately get access anywhere Citi has a local presence. Poland, Brazil, Vietnam, I mean, pretty much any market you can imagine.
We are thrilled to support these types of clients and enable their progress. Commercial bank clients like Flywire are not only attractive to Citi because of the results we're achieving. They're attractive for Citi because they transact across all of our product lines and traverse across segments from wealth to banking. We fit neatly into the Citi infrastructure and utilize the common product platforms. This means we benefit greatly from the innovation and the investments that our product partners are making. From a Citi perspective, by scaling CCB, we're simply generating more volume through our existing pipes, capitalizing on both our past and future investments, and that's gotta be a good thing for the firm. Another reason why this client segment is so attractive for Citi is because of the adjacency it has to other client segments, in particular, wealth and banking.
With wealth, we're establishing a robust partnership because we see personal wealth inextricably linked to business wealth. Around 90% of our clients are privately owned, so there's an enormous potential for us to work together and ensure we're looking at both sides of the client relationship. Because when you look at both sides of a relationship, you're able to come up with far better solutions for the client. Our adjacency to banking is also valuable because we act as an escalator, because when our clients grow, we're able to move with them. As Paco mentioned, we are there for each corporate milestone for our clients, and we ensure they get the right experts advising them on the breadth of possibilities they should be considering.
Commercial clients may also be suppliers or distributors of our large corporate clients, so we're able to serve the entire supply chain using our innovative solutions. I want to emphasize how easy it is to scale this business. The base infrastructure, like product and technology platforms or country footprint, is already there, so our focus is on expanding our client base. We are, however, investing in client experience, and I will touch on what we are doing there a little bit later. This is a great business with a good foundation, so you're probably wondering how we're gonna grow it further. We will grow by leaning into three trends. The first, and it's been a recurring theme today, is the unprecedented speed at which clients are going global. Many are born global, but there are others that are going global at breakneck speed, and that's really good news for us.
Today, we're able to support clients in around 60% of the countries Citi is in. By the end of this year, we expect to get close to 100%. The second trend I see is that clients are more sophisticated than ever. Gone are the days when a banker could show up to a client and wow them with basic banking product. Clients are very knowledgeable and have high expectations. They're easily able to differentiate commodity banking product, which becomes a price negotiation, versus real tailored solutions that help our clients serve their clients better. Being away from Citi over the last three years, I realized just how much we take our capabilities for granted. We assume that other banks have similar capabilities, but they just don't. What I need to do is ensure that our bankers know that, and that's why we're investing in our talent.
Our bankers need to be strong and not only deliver industry expertise, but go one step further and deliver industry-specific solutions that really add value for our clients. We want to ensure that each and every one of our bankers is trained in the power of the solutions and tools available to them. It's not just about the competency of our bankers, it's also the mindset that Jane talked about to deliver the full power of Citi. The third trend I see, and it's another recurring theme, is the speed at which clients are accelerating their own digital capabilities. I saw many clients, particularly in the last two years of the pandemic, pivot their business model entirely. For example, going from brick and mortar to fully online. That plays very well to Citi's strengths and to the value proposition we've been discussing.
The investments we're making in our digital services will ensure that when clients want to interact with us, they're getting the best client experience and can connect with us seamlessly as well. As we mobilize around these trends, we will be well-positioned to capture more of the commercial bank wallet. The global wallet is around $500 billion, so it's enormous. Now because we take a selective approach to our target market, we're focusing our efforts on about 30% of that, and that 30% we call the addressable wallet, which is around $150 billion, which is still very large. We currently have a 2% market share of this addressable wallet, therefore, the runway for us to grow is really, really long. We have decided to prioritize several specific opportunities.
The first, we will focus on developed markets, and one of our key priorities is the U.S., where we are seriously under-penetrated. We are going to be stepping up our efforts considerably here. Another is the U.K. We launched the commercial bank in the U.K. only three years ago, and in such a short period of time, the U.K. has become the largest country in our EMEA CCB business. Thirdly, we're expanding in Western Europe, where we're just getting started. In the last 12 months, we've launched in seven additional Western European markets, and our deal pipelines are beginning to build. What delights me the most is the strength of our brand in the new markets we enter. There are no clients that refuse to meet us, and each client that we call upon wants to hear from us.
Another priority are large developing markets where we already have a presence. In countries like China, India, or Brazil, the sheer size of these economies means that there's a huge opportunity for us to grow our client base. These are big economies where a lot of the GDP is driven by global flows, and we want our share of that. Finally, we will continue to deepen the relationships with our existing clients. We've already got 14,000 clients in the Commercial Bank, and while we're doing well with them, I don't want to be complacent, as there are many more things we can be doing with these clients, either through enhanced solutions or by working with wealth and banking. Over the last two years, we've onboarded 1,700 clients and produced more than $ 500,000,000 of incremental revenue from these new clients.
That's what makes me really confident about our value proposition. Our goal is to double our market share in the addressable wallet to 4%. If we're able to achieve all of that, we would generate over $3 billion of incremental revenue for Citi. An enabler to capture this growth is client experience, and we have several areas of investments. The first is for our bankers, who are such a key part of the client experience. As I mentioned already, we're gonna continue to develop our bankers and invest in their skills. On top of that, we're going to hire a further 400 bankers over the next three years to increase our capacity in the markets that we want to grow. Secondly, we're investing in a digital portal to provide a single way for clients to access Citi's products and solutions.
We want to make the way into Citi as easy as possible for clients to execute their everyday tasks, whether it's an FX transaction or making a payment or managing their loans. The portal will also make onboarding clients and other self-service tasks easy. The last great differentiator for Citi is the host-to-host connectivity and the level of automation that we can facilitate. I think Shahmir has already explained it very well. We are going to be exposing all of these capabilities to this set of clients. With a combination of investments in our bankers and our digital tools, I feel we are in pole position to back ourselves and accelerate our growth. Let me conclude and summarize. We have successfully grown our business over the last several years and proven both our business model and that our value proposition is attractive for clients.
Our business has stayed resilient despite some of the worst economic cycles and still produced very strong returns to Citi. Our focus now is to drive growth and scale this business up. We will achieve scale by accelerating our investments in developed markets and large developing markets, leveraging the ICG infrastructure. The marginal cost to do that is fairly small, and we can produce strong returns and revenue growth on the back of that. We will focus on deepening client relationships through investment in our bankers and our digital channels, and we'll provide the multiple touch points into the rest of Citi for our clients. My priority now is to unleash the power of Citi to this client segment. If we do all of this right, we should drive growth for Citi and double our market share to 4%.
As I said at the beginning, what we have at Citi is something unique, and my recent time away from Citi has just strengthened my conviction even more. This may be a business that you've not heard much about in the past, but I hope that this gives you a flavor of our ambition and our future potential. Thank you. Now I would like to hand it back to Paco.
Thank you, Tasnim and Shahmir. I want now to talk about our third strategic initiative, driving value in ICG's core profit engines, banking and markets. Strategically, when we think of these businesses together, they deal respectively in the primary and secondary sides of capital markets, and they come together to provide solutions in episodic situations. They require each other, and they reinforce each other. We will see that in banking and markets, we have a scale today, and with that, we produce high revenues and solid returns. What drives our plans for these businesses is the conviction that we can improve from our current position in a returns-accretive way. I will start with banking first. This is a $6.6 billion global underwriting and advisory business with a diversified client set, consistently strong globally and highly profitable.
We have a strong market position across all elements of our banking franchise. In recent times, we have improved our shares in M&A and ECM, but we have suffered somewhat in our DCM franchise because of our conservative approach to the leveraged finance market. Overall, we have kept up with a very strong performance of the market. This is where we sit today. With this market position, while not the largest, we have critical mass, and we're relevant to our clients, capable of providing competitive offerings across all asset classes. We're producing very solid returns. Where do we go from here? The basic message is that we want to keep positive momentum and gain share by making judicious targeted investments. We have three key strategic priorities. The first one is to keep investing in talent and to redirect our coverage to key growth sectors.
The second one is to recalibrate our franchise in recognition of the significant shift towards private capital. Sponsors and high-growth private companies are going to be big drivers of the banking wallet. The third one is making sure that as we grow our banking business, that we capture the cross-sell opportunities offered by our larger ICG franchise and by the growth in our commercial bank. Starting with talent and coverage alignment, our critical goal is to add franchise-impacting talent to our team and to direct that talent and our home-run talent toward the critical growth sectors. On the left, you will see the strategic investments we have made in our senior talent in recent years. In doing that, we operate in a very competitive environment for talent. This has required us to be especially nimble as we navigate losses in talent while seeking to add strategic hires.
We continue to seek talent that has significant franchise impact versus merely growing numbers. We're decisive when the opportunity appears, and we're happy with the caliber of the talent that we have been able to bring in. On the right side of this slide, you can see the importance for us to invest in growth sectors where we're still underweight versus our top competitors. To do that, apart from building our talent, we have to ensure that it's directed at the right opportunities. That is why we have redrawn our long-established industry sectors to reflect what we believe is driving change in the economy. Digital disruption, health and wellness convergence, sustainability revolution, and energy transition. We're trying to give our bankers the right perimeter so that they can be most helpful as our clients adapt and try to take advantage of those changes.
You can see in this slide the four super sectors that we have created. We have brought talent in, shifted talent internally, and we'll continue to do so whenever the opportunity arises to focus our banking resources on growth and returns. Our second strategic priority is to recalibrate our franchise in recognition of the significant shift towards private capital. As you can see on the left part of the slide, our share with the sponsors is disproportionately small, in particular our share of the leveraged finance wallet. This should be an area of natural strength for us, given our footprint and our strength in financing and securitization and private debt. Our share has deteriorated and impacted our overall DCM and share over the last few years because of a very conservative risk stance versus the leveraged finance market.
Recapturing share in leveraged finance and capitalizing on the private asset opportunity will require us to increase our capital allocation to these sectors. We believe we can do that while retaining a prudent approach to risk and staying within our risk appetite. The third pillar is making sure that as we grow our banking business, we capture the opportunity offered by our larger ICG franchise and by Citi more broadly. Starting with commercial bankers, as Tasnim noted, our clients already have a significant banking wallet, and we already have a sizable business with them. These days, you don't have to wait long for a company to generate banking wallet in its life cycle. As our commercial bank business grows globally, our banking business will grow with it, and this will be a differentiating feature of our franchise.
Furthermore, as some of our commercial bank clients grow into very large companies, the fact that we will have been with them from the beginning will give us a privileged position for the future. To capture this opportunity, we have aligned our banking strategy with our commercial bank. As we grow our banking business with our traditional large corporate clients, we will also enjoy significant cross-sell opportunities. For instance, episodic derivatives of risk management transactions around events or sourcing of private capital that may be necessary for those events to happen. There may also be custody and agency opportunities around this, and TTS may be critical in situations where companies are significantly changing their operating model. Realizing these cross-sell opportunities is the natural mandate of our very strong corporate bank.
In conclusion, connecting with the rest of ICG and wealth can provide a multiplier of the growth in investment banking revenues, and we are determined to capture it. Through these three priorities that I just discussed, we believe we have a very good opportunity to grow our revenue and our share in banking. Let me now move on to markets. In our first slide, we take a broad look at our markets business. Let me highlight a few things. First, we note the size of this business, $18 billion of revenue in 2021, a very significant part of ICG. Secondly, we have a strong competitive position in the industry, ranking second in fixed income and fifth in equities, a significant improvement in recent years.
Our franchise has a diversified client base with particularly strong relationships with corporates, a concentration that is unique in the industry and one that drives the stability of our performance. We have solid returns and efficiency, given a still evolving complex and rather punitive regulatory capital regime. As we will discuss, managing capital intelligently has been essential to running a strong markets business always. Finally, in recent years, we have become more client-oriented, and so our revenues are more correlated to activity than to market direction, and therefore, more stable. Where do we go from here in markets? Our general direction is to increase our relevance to our clients and our profitability. Of course, we want to retain our leading position and growth share with this opportunity to do so, but only while keeping a close eye on returns. How are we going to do that?
Our number one goal is to continuously improve the productivity of the capital that we deploy as we adapt to changes in the regulatory framework and in the market environment. Our second goal is to direct our attention and resources towards higher-margin businesses. Thirdly, we must constantly make our core flow businesses more efficient via automation and digital solutions. Let me spend a few moments on each one of these. First is capital management. This is a very complex topic. I will try to give you a sense of the challenge and what we're doing about it. In this analysis, we use the ratio of revenue to risk-weighted assets as a proxy for capital intensity. To help you connect these two returns, all else equal, a 10 basis point change in this ratio corresponds to a 60-70 basis point change in returns.
4.5%-5.5% in this ratio is a significant range in returns. Getting towards the upper end is critical for the business. What drives that capital intensity? On the left side of this slide, we have tried to collapse a complex set of variables into 4 key drivers. The first one is regulatory changes, especially to the definition that is binding for us at a particular time. Another is market variables such as credit ratings or implied volatility, which are used in some calculations and have a significant impact on capital. The third driver is business performance, which naturally affects returns. Finally, capital efficiency actions, which are adjustments in our types of business activity. The left column shows what happened to each of those drivers during the COVID crisis, and the right shows what we expect going forward.
Regulatory changes and market circumstances are something we will have to live with and adjust to. Obviously, we can control our business performance, and we will talk about that in the coming couple of slides. What can we do other than that, what is in our hands? We can change or reprice activity, sometimes with help from the market. We can develop hedging and distribution capabilities, and we can improve our data and analytic capabilities, which allow for more intelligent decision-making and more accurate calculations. We have been doing this for some time, but we have to adjust to new changes, and we have to become better at it. The second thing that we have to do in the markets business is to continue to direct our attention and resources to higher margin business.
You will not be surprised to find that these activities are interconnected with other ICG priorities as well. One is to increase our business with the sponsors and private capital asset managers. We have referred to the extraordinary growth in private capital in recent years. You can see it on the left part of this slide. As in the case of banking, this creates huge opportunities for our markets business and in particular for our leading financing and securitizations business. As you can see on the right part of this slide our diversified balance sheet mix for that business. Here we laid out our third goal for our markets business, which is to transform our flow businesses. These activities are very important to our clients but always subject to intense margin pressure. We need to be constantly improving our efficiency.
Here we use our FX business as an illustration of what we're experiencing to some extent across all asset classes. As you see in the graph, voice FX, so over the years, a deterioration of margins, which ultimately forced changes allowing scale players to significantly recover those margins. How did that happen? It took two steps. Of course, the first one was electronification, getting computers to do more of the job. The second was a change in approach. From a focus on the transactional moment to one of solving the end-to-end needs of our clients, pre- and post-trade, with the transaction happening automatically and embedded in the client's own operational processes. It is in a way the convergence of markets and services as we try to illustrate on the right side of this slide.
We will retain our relevance in flow, and we're very aware of how automation and connectivity will transform these activities into something akin to what our services businesses are today. That is our direction of travel. Our aim is to retain our leading position in fixed income, improve our share in equities, and increase our returns. As we conclude the ICG presentation, I just want to recap. We have described our strategy and touched on our three core priorities, heavily investing in our services platforms, building our Global Commercial Bank, and continuing to improve relevance and returns in our already strong banking and markets franchises. What will this all mean for our revenues and returns? As the ICG team executes against these priorities we have just discussed, these are the key metrics we plan to use to assess and direct our efforts.
Importantly, we'll be sharing these outcomes with you to similarly gauge our progress. Mark will elaborate on these and provide visibility into drivers of the rest of Citi. Together, progress against these business metrics underpin the financial performance we plan to deliver. Thank you for your time this morning. I hope we were able to provide you with additional insight into the nature of our ICG business and our strategy for the future. I have been fortunate to lead various businesses here at Citi, sometimes through challenging periods. That experience has given me confidence in the resilience of our franchise and belief in its potential. I don't think the opportunity has ever been better for us. Next, you will hear from our personal banking and wealth management business. I will see you at the end of the program for Q&A. Thank you, and Anand, over to you.
Good morning, everyone. I am Anand Selvakesari, Selva in short, and I'm responsible for personal banking and wealth management. I've been at Citi for over 30 years, mostly in consumer banking and wealth management. I spent the first 27 years building our business across Asia and EMEA. I've lived and worked in many markets, including India, Singapore, China, and Taiwan. I've been here in the U.S. for the last three years, most recently leading our U.S. consumer banking business. Over the course of my career, I have witnessed firsthand the digital disruption and rapid evolution of personal banking. I'm really looking forward to leveraging my learnings to position our business well as these trends play out in the U.S. and globally. Consumer banking and wealth management looks very different today than it did just three years ago. Advances in technology and the pandemic have changed consumer behavior.
They're increasingly seeking seamless and highly personalized digital experiences, and are demanding choices and flexibility in how they bank, pay, and borrow. Shifting demographics across the wealth continuum and the intergenerational transfer of wealth have increased demand for new digital capabilities, along with trusted advice, and more diverse teams of advisors to manage wealth. In personal banking and wealth management, we are focusing our strategy and our investments to stay close to these trends. We offer a comprehensive range of financial solutions, from credit cards and checking accounts to investments and capital market solutions, leveraging the power of the entire Citi franchise. All of this sits on a foundation of award-winning digital experiences. I am confident that our newly refocused U.S. personal banking and wealth management business will play an important role in Citi's ability to drive shareholder value.
Earlier, Jane spoke about the importance of shifting our business mix so that we'd have both growth and scale businesses with strong competitive positioning. She also spoke about the importance of our businesses having clear synergies with the broader Citi franchise. With the strategic actions we've announced last year, PBWM now consists of two core businesses, U.S. personal banking and Global Wealth Management, that fit squarely into these criteria. U.S. personal banking includes branded cards, retail services, and retail banking, and serves our home market, which has the largest consumer wallet in the world. Personal banking contributes 2/3 of PBWM revenue. Global Wealth Management is a fast-growing market, where we are bringing together the full power of Citi to serve the entire continuum of wealth clients, from affluent to ultra-high net worth. Global Wealth Management contributes the remaining 1/3 of PBWM revenue.
In PBWM, we serve 75 million clients with around $940 billion in client assets across the two core businesses, generating $23 billion in revenue and 13% ROTCE, excluding the impact of credit reserve releases. Our ambitions for both businesses are built on strong existing foundations and the connections between the two. Our Global Wealth Management business includes our top five global private bank, and we're already the top three firm in wealth management in Asia. Over the last five years, Global Wealth Management delivered 20% ROTCE. Our wealth business benefits significantly from leveraging the products, platforms, digital capabilities, and client relationships we already have across both the U.S. personal banking and institutional businesses.
As we scale the wealth business, it is clear that we are one of the very few firms that offer such a comprehensive range of wealth solutions to a wide spectrum of clients on a global scale. In U.S. personal banking, we are the number two issuer of credit cards, with a broad portfolio of proprietary, co-brand, and private label cards. Growth in this business is centered in payments and lending, with our cards business generating close to 85% of our revenues. Our go-forward plan is to continue to strengthen our leadership in cards while establishing a full continuum of lending solutions. Our retail banking is a top 10 deposit franchise in the U.S., with well-established presence in six affluent urban centers and strong digital capabilities.
We have a targeted strategy to maximize value from our retail bank and to fuel our growth plans in both wealth management and payments and lending. Over the last five years, U.S. personal banking delivered 12% ROTCE despite the headwinds from COVID and lower rates. Within U.S. personal banking, our cards business delivered 17% returns. With that introduction, I'm now going to turn it over to our Head of Global Wealth Management, Jim O'Donnell, to tell you more about our plans for the wealth business. I'll come back and go into more detail with U.S. personal banking and then tie it all together. Over to you, Jim.
Thanks, Anand, and good morning, everyone. I'm Jim O'Donnell. I became Head of Wealth a little over a year ago after 22 years at Citi. Most recently, I ran Global Investor Sales and Relationship Management for our Markets and Securities Services business. Much like wealth management, it was truly a people business. Having worked closely with asset and wealth managers around the world, I could not be more excited to use this experience to build Citi's wealth business, and I think we have a huge opportunity ahead of us. As you all know, there's incredible wealth creation happening globally, and client demographics are shifting. More and more clients are looking for advice that encompasses their full financial lives. They're putting an increased premium on relationships and personalized service, combined with a seamless digital experience.
Integrating our wealth business gives us the resources, the talent, and the platform to deliver just that. Because of our global footprint, our ability to leverage Citi's network, and the strong foundation we already have, we are well-positioned to deliver excellence for our clients, grow our market share, and create value for you, our investors. As you heard from Jane earlier, we have all the pieces to build a leading franchise, but we need to pull it all together. We have spent the last year integrating our wealth business, building a new leadership team, and creating a strategy for the future. We are now in execution mode, and we are making clear progress. I'm incredibly confident we will build a winning business in wealth management for Citi. Let's talk about our business today. We're not starting from scratch. We have strong assets.
We have globally recognized brands, strong client relationships, best-in-class research, and clear synergies across Citi. As you can see on the slide, we're a $7.5 billion business today, with revenues evenly split between our ultra-high net worth clients, our private bank, and high net worth and affluent clients, Citigold. We serve over 500,000 clients with more than $800 billion in client assets through nearly 3,000 advisors. Our strong foundation spans across client segments, geographies, and product capabilities. As you've heard, we are already a top three wealth manager in Asia and a top five global private bank. Our Law Firm Group, which is the foundation of our Global Wealth at Work business, is the industry leader in providing financial services to the legal industry.
As you can see on the slide, we have a global footprint, with nearly half of our business coming from outside the United States. This is absolutely a clear differentiator for us. We are one of the few firms that operates and has a physical presence in all key global wealth markets, and we are a major player in all of the international wealth hubs that have significant cross-border flows. We plan to scale in every one of those markets. We also have a diverse product mix, as you see on the slide as well. We're particularly strong in banking and lending, which account for over 60% of our revenues. But we need to earn more of our clients' investments business. We do have a best-in-class investments platform, which we were able to grow by 27% last year.
However, our goal is to significantly grow this over the next few years and achieve a better balance between banking and lending and our investments business. This will very much enhance our returns and, most importantly, deliver more value for our clients. Let me tell you a little bit now about our value proposition. Our mission is to deliver a total wealth solution to our clients, integrating advice and execution across both their assets and their liabilities. Very few firms have these capabilities on a global scale. We do. As an integrated business, we can deliver comprehensive solutions that range from core personal banking and lending to leading institutional capabilities. We deliver everything our clients need, from a checking account, a credit card, or a mortgage, to investment management and access to global capital markets.
For our wealthiest clients and family offices, we provide all of that, plus specialized financing and corporate and M&A services. We deliver these solutions across the entire wealth continuum, from the affluent to the ultra-high net worth. Now, let me give you a quick overview of our brands. Citigold and Citigold Private Client serve our affluent and high-net-worth clients. Our private bank serves our ultra-high-net-worth clients and the family offices of the world's wealthiest individuals. Finally, Citi Global Wealth at Work is our business that is focused on workplace wealth management. We have seen that clients across all levels of wealth want their financial lives to be simpler and more personalized, and rightfully so. They want timely advice and recommendations, all tailored to their evolving needs throughout their financial lives.
Citi has the capability to deliver this at scale, across all geographies and client segments, by leveraging our entire franchise. As Jane said, our global network across retail banking and ICG is a key differentiator for us. It provides client referrals and product expertise. Let me tell you a little bit about our synergies. We generated more than $1 billion between our wealth management business and our institutional clients group last year. We expect this to significantly increase as we scale and invest in our businesses. Citi's global businesses have also served as a major source of client referrals.
As you can see on the slide, last year, we captured over 50,000 new wealth clients from our retail banking network, and we also generated a record 730 client referrals with an average net worth of more than $400 million between our private bank and our institutional clients group. Our partnerships with our BCMA markets and retail banking teams are already delivering meaningful results, and there's lots more to come. We're excited to build the same type of close partnership with our commercial bank. As my colleague Tasnim told us a little while ago, more than 90% of commercial bank clients are private companies, which represents an enormous opportunity for our wealth business.
Now, as an integrated wealth business, we're also now breaking down more silos, and in the coming weeks, we will deliver our best-in-class research to all of our 500,000 wealth clients. Doing all of this will allow us to better serve clients and improve our returns. I think as you can see, the close and successful partnerships we have built and are building throughout Citi are core to how we deliver value for our clients and our shareholders, and this is an absolutely critical part of our strategy. Now, I'd like you to hear directly from a few of our clients about how we're delivering value for them across all of our firm.
With our global network and local expertise, we're uniquely positioned to advise our ultra-high-net-worth clients, their families, and their companies around the world.
Citi was my first bank when I got to New York. I was all excited to get my little CitiCard. I didn't know you could take money out of cash machines, so I was all excited. My relationship with Citi just became longer and deeper. They're phenomenal. I mean, you wouldn't think for such a large bank that they would be so personal about all the little details. We can break it down on the business side and then on the personal side. Our firm is global, and sort of the things I do are global in nature. I need a partner who can understand that.
Our relationship with Citibank goes back over more than half a century with my family at large. Citi as an institution is a truly global one, and it really helps when they want to serve a client who actually also travels, who actually also has needs in different places. It's something which is taken for granted by many, but it's in my view, something very rare.
We have tried and tested our business model with Law Firm Group for over 50 years. With that as our foundation, we are expanding our business to further meet our clients' needs.
My personal life cycle, professional life cycle as a partner of the firm has mirrored my relationship with Citibank. I'm now working with Citibank proactively on my sort of longer-term plans in terms of retirement income and asset accumulation and estate planning, and it's been a tremendous partnership.
A huge thank you to our clients who were part of that video. I absolutely love hearing how we help them achieve their goals. These are the type of relationships that define our wealth strategy, and we are focused, just to, as a refresher, on three core client segments, the ultra-high-net-worth space, our private bank, regional strategies in the affluent and high-net-worth market, especially in the U.S. and in Asia, and our global wealth at work business. Underscoring all of these initiatives is our investment in both talent and technology. Hiring and retaining talent is one of the most important parts of our strategy. As I said, we're very much a people business. Focused on the fastest-growing markets, we are significantly increasing the number of our client advisors. Despite the talent war across the industry, we are attracting great external candidates.
We added more than 400 advisors in 2021, an increase of nearly 20%. Above all, we're also keenly focused on investing in and retaining our existing talent. We've seen that our own advisors and the ones that we're hiring value Citi's network. That includes our ability to source clients through our retail and institutional platforms and the access to our best-in-class banking and wealth solutions. Across the board, we are focused on creating a diverse talent base that very much reflects the clients we serve. We are confident we can double our advisor base over the next five years. As you can see in the slide, we're also building a digital experience that better connects our talent and our technology. Now, this is an area where we historically underinvested. By integrating our wealth team, we have now created a single technology unit.
This will allow us to more effectively invest in three core priorities, client experience, advisor experience, and product capabilities. For our clients, we're creating an enhanced digital experience with new products like Citi Self Invest, which I'll discuss more in a little bit, and better online tools. For our advisors, we're enhancing and simplifying how they serve their clients through a unified CRM system, an improved workstation, and easy digital client onboarding. Finally, we are investing in our infrastructure to improve product capabilities, such as enhancing our separately managed account and margin lending platforms and developing personalized content and solutions. Now I'd like to take you through our growth initiatives in a bit more detail. Starting with our top five private bank, it's a great business with great people.
It represents 40% of our revenues, with nearly half a trillion dollars in assets and 10,000 clients who have an average net worth of more than $400 million. We've had strong growth over the last few years, especially in client acquisition. Last year alone, we onboarded 800 new clients, a record, and grew our assets by 9%, and we've only just begun. To build on this strong foundation and capture new sources of wealth, we are scaling across geographies and building new client segments. We are already on the ground in our private bank in 50 cities across 18 countries, including all key wealth markets. Our physical presence ensures we are viewed as both a global and local bank wherever we are.
We're expanding in the fastest-growing ultra-high-net-worth markets, specifically China, which has the second-largest concentration of wealth in the world and significant cross-border flows. We're also expanding in key markets in the U.S., especially California, Texas, Florida, and here in New York. In Europe, where we have a limited presence in some markets, such as Germany and France. Today, we cover more than a quarter of the world's billionaires and 1,400 family offices. Growing this business is a critical part of our strategy. Additionally, to expand our client segments, we're very focused on a full family approach to wealth management. This means we embrace the entire family, the spouse, the children, grandkids, and beyond. We recognize the importance of the intergenerational wealth transfer that's occurring.
A few months ago, I had the opportunity to speak with a private bank client whose family has been with Citi for more than 90 years. His father first started banking with us in Shanghai in 1932. This client is now based in Brazil, has family in Miami and the Bahamas. Multiple generations of his family are now Citi clients. He proudly told me, which is pretty cool, that his family would not be where it is today without Citi. Relationships like these are the bedrock of our business, and we have many more to build upon, and we absolutely will. We're also focused on strong growth segments where we see significant opportunity. This includes new economy entrepreneurs and especially women. Women are one of the most important and fastest-growing markets in the ultra-high-net-worth space, and a key focus for us.
Going a bit further out, one of our goals is to grow our share of the investment wallet and enhance our advice to clients. We are materially increasing the number of dedicated investment counselors. Now, let me explain that a little. Some of our competitors in the private bank space have a ratio of close to one investment counselor for every banker. We have one investment counselor for every three bankers, far too few. We are committed to significantly improving that ratio to better serve our clients and support our growing focus on investments. In summary for our private bank, I am confident that our strategy, combined with our strong franchise, and our team, positions us to be the world's leading private bank in the years ahead. Moving on to our affluent and high-net-worth businesses, let's begin with Asia, which is the fastest-growing market in the world.
We are well-positioned to capture that growth by expanding in our key wealth hubs, increasing our advisor coverage, and driving digital innovation. Citi is already a top-three wealth manager in Asia, with nearly $90 billion in client assets across 110,000 wealth clients. Today, we have 800 advisors, which we increased by 130 in the last 12 months alone. As Jane mentioned earlier, yes, we are exiting non-core markets in the region, but this allows us to have a sharper focus on the key wealth hubs of Hong Kong and Singapore, two of the fastest-growing wealth markets in the world, with a full-service business for both onshore and offshore clients offering our total wealth solution. Capturing the offshore market in China is a key driver of our strategy, especially the Greater Bay Area, with the industry's rollout of Wealth Connect.
We have an exciting new partnership with China Guangfa Bank, who have 230 branches in the Greater Bay Area alone. In addition, we are significantly expanding our sales and marketing teams on the ground. In fact, we will more than double them by the end of this year. We've also already been recognized as the best digital bank in Asia, and we will continue to invest in our digital platforms to drive our client experience and client acquisition. Now let's turn to the U.S. As you all know, the U.S. is the largest and most competitive wealth market in the world. We currently have more than $180 billion in client assets and 320,000 clients with significant opportunity to grow.
Our focus is on building on our strong presence in Citi's six key retail markets, expanding our advisor base and client coverage, and especially leveraging the client referrals we've mentioned from our branches. We are also enhancing our digital capabilities. We've already seen early success of that with the soft launch of our self-directed offering, Citi Self Invest. Focused on internal marketing, we have seen a 27% increase in asset growth year to date in that product, and 90% of Citi Self Invest users did their first investment transaction with Citi in the last four months. We have an exciting plan to roll this out across all of our client segments and launch a broader external marketing campaign to acquire new clients. Today, now I'm also excited to announce the creation of a new business for us, Citi Alliance, to build new distribution partnerships.
With Citi Alliance, we will be providing core banking and lending solutions to independent advisors and broker-dealers, one of the fastest-growing segments in the United States. We're working with a great digital partner, InvestCloud, who will offer our banking and lending products to the nearly 150 wealth management firms on their platform. We're excited that we've already signed agreements with several wealth managers with a very strong pipeline, and we see this as a great opportunity in the months and years ahead. The final pillar of our growth strategy is Global Wealth at Work. As many of you know, workplace management is the fastest-growing channel in the industry, and we are uniquely positioned to build a winning business here.
We know our strategy works because we've road tested it for the last 50 years with our Law Firm Group, where we are the undisputed wealth management leader in the legal industry. Our 50,000 clients in this segment mirror our focus on the entire wealth continuum. We serve professionals from the beginning of their careers right through the C-suite, providing the full breadth of our services from banking to cards to investments. This is a great model for client acquisition and building long-standing client relationships. In fact, we have Law Firm Group clients who have been with us the whole time we've been in this business, from their time as a junior associate to managing partner through their retirement. We plan to grow this business in 3 ways.
First, we will continue to scale the Law Firm Group, where we already work with nearly 1,000 companies. Second, we are expanding this model to targeted new industries like professional services, asset management, private equity, and venture capital firms. This year, we're excited too that we've already signed agreements with several large firms, adding thousands of clients in these new industries. Third, as I've talked about before, in this space, we're incredibly excited about growing our partnership with Citi Commercial Bank, where we see significant opportunity to access their client base. In summary, we are incredibly excited about our opportunity to win in Wealth Management. We are going to succeed by scaling our business, driving the synergies across all of Citi's network, investing in talent and technology, and delivering that total wealth solution for our clients across the globe.
We do have ambitious targets over the next few years, but I have no doubt we will succeed with double-digit growth in client acquisition and client assets. We have a lot of work to do, but we have the platform, the people, and the resources to win in wealth management. As we execute, we will significantly grow our revenue and enhance our returns. With that, I'd like to hand it back over to Anand. Thank you all very much.
Thank you, Jim, for outlining our strategy and exciting growth potential for the global wealth business. Now let's turn to U.S. Personal Banking. U.S. Personal Banking is a large business, serving 72 million customers with close to $170 billion in loans and generating close to $16 billion in revenue. About 85% of U.S. Personal Banking revenue and 80% of loans are from our market-leading cards business. Our retail bank is a great feeder to our wealth business, driving referrals through the branch network. It generates about $220 billion in deposits, which includes about $100 billion of deposits reported in Global Wealth Management. Last year, U.S. Personal Banking delivered 27% returns, 13% if you exclude credit reserve releases.
As I had mentioned earlier, we do have strong market position in both our wealth management and personal banking businesses. In PBWM, we are a market leader in cards in the U.S., with number two position in card spend and loan balances. We rank fourth in deposits in the six urban centers where we have our branches. Although our retail bank physical footprint is much smaller than our peers, our branches are highly productive, with the highest deposits per branch in the country. As you can see, we have attractive assets and leadership in cards, positioning us well for growth. We all know that the last couple of years have been challenging across our industry as the pandemic impacted macro business drivers and customer behavior. I'd like to go into some depth to explain how that impacted our results and what it really means for us going forward.
Before the pandemic, card spend, loans, and revenues showed a clear upward trajectory. In 2020, we started seeing headwinds of COVID with card spend and loans declining. Payment rates increased, leading to a sharp decline in our revenues, offset by lower cost of credit. The same story played out across our industry. In 2021, card spend rebounded and is now up 10% from pre-COVID levels, reaching an all-time high of half a trillion dollars. However, payment rates remain a challenge. Savings and stimulus have led to consumers paying down their credit cards at historically high rates and with losses remaining remarkably low. This has prevented the strong sales growth from translating into loan growth. We expect card spend to remain strong and payment rates to normalize over a period of time, and that will lead to loan growth.
As loans pivot to growth, we expect credit losses to also normalize from current historical lows. In retail banking, we have seen strong growth in deposits driven by higher household savings. Apart from higher savings and higher payment rates, we witnessed other changes to consumer behaviors. We expect many of these changes to be long-lasting. As these changes were happening, we haven't been sitting still. We have continued to make smart investments to respond to and take advantage of those changes. The first change, the shift to digital. This has been much discussed, but let me share some statistics. Online credit and debit spending has grown by 30%, and over 50% of consumers started using their mobile banking app more often during the pandemic. What did we do about it?
We continue to invest in seamless digital experiences for essential banking needs, such as account opening, wire transfers, and bill payments. We created personalized offers driving online purchases that accounted for over 35% of our total branded card sales. Second, consumers expect more borrowing choices, driving growth in point-of-sale financing. We strengthened our lending solutions, launching on-card Flex Pay and Flex Loans, and off-card personal installment loans. We're also embedding point-of-sale and post-sale financing solutions with our partners. Third, 74% of our customers say that rewards are the main reason they choose credit over other forms of payment, and over 60% prefer cash back as their choice of rewards. We addressed this by refreshing our rewards portfolio with Rewards+ Card and introducing the new Custom Cash Card last year.
Over the last couple of years, we also invested in our partner network, signing a major e-commerce retailer, Wayfair, and extending long-term marquee partnerships, including Macy's, AT&T, and ExxonMobil. Staying front-footed with investments has given us great momentum heading into this year as we execute on a strategy that clearly differentiates us from our peers. When I moved to the U.S. to run the U.S. Consumer Bank in early 2019, we had a narrow set of payment and borrowing options for our customers. We had limited digital capabilities, very little connection with retail banking, and our partner relationships were centered on a credit card-only proposition. Now, coming from Asia, I was able to transfer our learning and success there, where we built market-leading digital capabilities and lending products and created a wide range of merchant offers.
As you can see on this page, we now have a comprehensive set of integrated solutions, and they have been deployed with very good success. Let me take a minute to explain that. A typical customer journey would start with a purchase. At the point of purchase, a customer has multiple payment options. They can pay with or without a plastic, pay with points, or pay using digital wallets wherein Citi cards are provisioned. They also have the option to finance their transaction at point of sale or post the sale. For those who need a cash loan, it is available on their card through Citi Flex Loan or through a personal loan off the card. As they're making these payments, they earn rewards as points, miles, or cash back.
We have made these rewards easily transferable, from cash to points, miles to points, and so on. Our merchant offers platform delivers attractive offers to our customers, creating more value for them while deepening our relationships with our merchants. All these payment and lending solutions can further be bundled with banking products, creating a truly integrated experience. This wide variety of products and partners, and our convenient and flexible integrated solutions differentiate us from our peers, and that is even more so with card-only or lending-only players, setting us up nicely for continued leadership. As I look ahead, these clear differentiators, combined with a strong foundation and the investments we are making to adapt to a fast-changing environment, drive our three growth priorities. First, we will strengthen our leadership in payments and lending, which we expect to be the biggest contributor of our medium-term growth.
What does that mean? That means growing faster in proprietary cards, deepening our partner network, and building a lending continuum both on and off card. Second, maximize value from our retail bank and further strengthen synergy with wealth management. Third, continue to drive digital leadership through investments in next gen technology. Now, let's unpack each of those, and let's start with payments and our plans to increase growth in proprietary cards. Over the last two years, we have refreshed our products with more flexibility in using rewards, a fully digital experience, and unique ways to earn cashback. We are committed to that path with a steady stream of refreshes and new products to keep our cards portfolio well-positioned in the marketplace. We are constantly enhancing our award-winning rewards program, adding new point of sale redemption options.
We now feature over 200 partners, such as Best Buy, for our card members to redeem their points. We're also adding new points transfer partners, such as Wyndham. Our partnership with PayPal offers customers access to a broad ecosystem of merchants. Last year, we partnered with Mastercard to introduce a merchant offers platform, which provides exciting discounts to our customers across thousands of merchants. The way we've gone about all of this is by powering our product features and offers with end-to-end digitized experiences. For example, our new Custom Cash Card was designed with a comprehensive digital-first approach with several new digital features, and it's driving significant digital engagement, as you can see on this page. Just like proprietary cards, co-brand and private label cards also have an important role to play in our growth plans.
Partner cards in the form of co-brands and private labels give us scale and drive sustainable returns, and they help us add significant value for customers, partners, and Citi. For customers, we offer choice and convenience in how they pay and borrow right at the point of sale with their favorite brands. For partners, we are able to deploy integrated solutions that drive sales and build loyalty. For Citi, we gain access to sales touchpoints, 200 million consumers, and nationwide footprint across the partner ecosystem. We are extremely proud of the partnerships we've built with about 40 strategic partners across a diverse set of industries, including five of the top ten e-commerce retailers in the U.S. This positions us well to capitalize on the opportunities from the significant growth we are seeing in e-commerce.
We also continuously review our partnerships for growth and the returns that they drive for us and explore opportunities to extend existing partnerships as well as add new ones. As of today, partner agreements covering 97% of our cards receivables extend to 2024 and beyond, ensuring continued growth and stability. In the past, our partnerships have been mainly focused on cards. Over the last couple of years, we've expanded those relationships into lending, rewards, and banking. For example, with American Airlines, we started our relationship decades ago with a co-brand card. We have evolved that relationship over the last couple of years into multiple offerings from savings accounts to installment loans and making the miles more dynamic with the ability to transfer them to ThankYou Points .
As we continue to grow our partner portfolio, not all successful strategic partnerships need to be a co-brand or a private label card. With Amazon, for example, we started our relationship with Shop with Points and have now extended to point of sale financing and payment options such as Buy with Prime. As you can see, our partner network is very valuable to us and a source of pride for our firm. We have been privileged to work with American Airlines. They've been great partners to us for about 35 years now. I would now like you to hear a bit more from them.
American has a long-standing relationship with Citi. After 35 years, you know, we know each other pretty well. Over that time, we've done remarkable things to take care of our customers, innovating every step of the way. There's been a long line of evolution, starting with just the co-brand AAdvantage credit card, all the way to things like Citi Flex Pay. The Citi and American relationship is one that has expanded in many ways. Everything from capital markets advice to actually doing something that was incredibly essential to American Airlines' future, supporting us in a $10 billion capital markets financing transaction that used the AAdvantage program as the basis for it. Our relationship, it's personal, it's long, it's deep.
What makes this partnership so strong is that we work together to constantly innovate on our core co-branded card, while at the same time, finding new ways to expand our relationship into new territories, like our Citi Miles Ahead savings accounts. Together with American, we keep evolving our partnership over time.
Everything we do stems from knowing each other really well, knowing what's valuable at Citi, and also knowing what's valuable to American Airlines. That creates an incredible relationship.
Thank you, Robert and Pam, for bringing to life the power of our partnership. Next, let me switch to lending. We are very excited with the opportunities and growth potential we see in lending. Historically, lending on cards was built on traditional revolving lines of credit. That remains the bulk of our interest income and will continue to be a prominent contributor of revenues going forward. To that, we have added new installment loan products, Flex Pay and Flex Loan, within the card. Flex Pay is buying now and paying later and is available as a financing option both at point of sale and after the transaction is done. Now we are expanding our lending solutions beyond credit cards to offer point-of-sale financing and personal loans without a credit card to complete the lending continuum.
We started by focusing on our existing customers to target over $50 billion of personal loan balances they have with other lenders. Point-of-sale financing is not new to us. In our retail services business, we have offered point-of-sale financing promos to our customers for over a decade, and we have significant experience in our international markets with such offerings. With our strong expertise through credit cycles, we will ensure that we offer these products responsibly and with sustained profitability. Our lending solutions have been very well received by our customers. As you see on the right side of the slide, card customers who take lending products from us bring new balances and drive higher revenue compared to transactors. In addition, they have meaningfully higher NPS and maintain strong credit performance.
Summing up payments and lending, we have a leadership in cards and loans, emerging scale in installment lending, strong digital capabilities, and attractive growth potential. Our second growth priority centers on retail banking. As Jane mentioned, our approach to retail banking in the U.S. has been, and will continue to be different from other banks that have a large retail presence. That said, there are clear opportunities for us to maximize value in retail banking, and we have made some changes over the last three years that will help us do that. As you all know, we have a light physical footprint supported by a large ATM network. From 2016- 2018, our retail deposit book was flat to slightly declining. However, from 2019 to 2021, we have grown our deposits by over a third to around $220 billion.
That was because we focused on higher productivity from branches, modernizing our branches, and building digital capabilities. These efforts dramatically improved our branch NPS from 68% at the end of 2018 to over 80% by end of 2021. Our retail bank is now well-positioned to drive growth in our two strategic priorities. One, retail banking has strong synergies with our wealth business, given that it is concentrated in six urban markets where our affluent customers reside. In fact, approximately 70% of our wealth management client accounts in the U.S. were opened or referred from the branches. Two, retail banking serves as a very good source of lower-cost funding to support payments and lending business. Around 90% of our deposits are in checking or low-cost savings accounts.
We continue to build out our digital capabilities to acquire retail accounts and deposits through our digital channels. That focus on digital has allowed us to grow our digital deposits nearly 3x since 2019, accounting for 20% of the growth in total deposits. Half of the digital deposit sales come from customers outside of our branch footprint, while we continue to expand our multi-relationship customer base by deepening our existing cards customers. We will continue to grow digital deposits, ensuring they make economic sense and deliver value for the franchise. With all that said, profitability in our retail banking business has been challenged. Despite strong growth in deposit volumes, the low interest rate environment has put pressure on our deposit margins and revenues. In addition, our investments in enhancing our risk and control environment and modernizing our technology further impact profitability.
Where do we go from here? We evaluated various options, and we concluded that we should focus on maximizing value from our retail bank in the medium term by delivering even more from our current infrastructure and assets while we benefit from rising rates in the coming years. First, we will target a top six deposit market share nationally, with sharper focus on deepening share in our six core urban markets. We will do that by continuing to refresh and right-size our branches while modernizing technology, including implementing a new customer relationship management platform. Second, we will continue to grow deposits through our digital acquisitions. We expect digital to drive over 30% of our deposit growth in the medium term. At the same time, we will drive value from increased relationship lending in mortgages and small business through our branches.
Third, we will continue to build on the strong synergies with wealth management, using the retail bank as a powerful feeder of wealth management clients. We firmly believe that investing in retail banking to maximize value and drive our PBWM growth priorities in the way we have laid out today is the most optimal and responsible way to use capital and investment dollars in the medium term, and this will contribute meaningfully to delivering our targeted returns in PBWM in the medium term. Our third strategic priority to drive growth is investing in digital and technology. We have been on a journey with our digital-first approach over the last few years, and we continue to invest in building digital capabilities. Given our light physical footprint, our focus on partnerships, and the demand we see from customers, digital is critical to our success.
We are seeing strong digital take-up across the business, be it in customer acquisition, online spending, or customers using our digital channels for transacting and servicing. We are spending about $2 billion in technology each year for PBWM. Besides the Citi-wide transformation effort that Karen will be talking about shortly today and the investments going into wealth management that Jim mentioned, a good portion of that investment will be in U.S. personal banking. We will be investing in modular platforms that enable us to plug and play with our partner systems using APIs and create seamless, secure, and resilient digital experiences driven by data. Our investments will help us improve speed to market and reduce tech development costs. While we have more to do as we continue to innovate and build new capabilities, our increased digital engagement is driving both revenue growth and efficiency.
Specifically, our digital users drive higher deposits and investment balances, higher revenue, and lower attrition rates than non-digital customers, with the cost to serve being much lower. We expect to see improved cost efficiencies and revenues as we automate, drive straight through processing, and continue to replace analog processes with digital. To summarize our path forward, we are going to strengthen our leadership in payments and lending, maximize the value from retail banking, and deliver seamless end-to-end digitized experiences with a modern tech infrastructure. We are truly excited for our future. We have a leading market position in payments and lending with tremendous scale, attractive assets in retail banking, strong capabilities, and exciting growth opportunities. In the medium term, subject to macroeconomic trends, we expect to attract more wealth management clients through our branch network, build our digital deposits, and pivot from the pandemic-driven headwinds in loan balances.
We expect that will drive continued growth in deposits, ANR, and revenue. Now, let me bring it all together across personal banking and wealth management and what our strategy will deliver from a growth perspective over the medium term, guided by the priorities Jane has outlined for our firm. To track our progress on this plan and hold ourselves accountable, we have outlined KPIs detailed on the slide. As we deliver against these metrics, I strongly believe that our well-thought-out, prudent, and focused strategy will deliver strong revenue growth in both Global Wealth Management and U.S. Personal Banking in the medium term. I know the team across PBWM is truly excited about what we can do together, and I am very excited and very confident. Thank you once again for joining us.
Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Karen Peetz, Citi's CAO. A little less than 2 years ago, much to the dismay of my husband and my five grandchildren, Citi persuaded me to come out of retirement to lead our firm's transformation efforts. With a healthy dose of humility, I can probably point to the reasons Citi asked me to be part of this effort. Over the course of my 40-plus year career, I've had the opportunity to help more than a few institutions remediate their regulatory issues and transform their organizations. I helped do that at JP Morgan and as president of BNY Mellon. I also served on the board of a GSIB peer bank before joining Citi in mid-2020. I've gained valuable experience over the course of my career, helping organizations facing challenges much like the ones Citi is contending with right now, and I'm putting those learnings to good use here.
I'd like to also tell you why I chose Citi. Despite what I just told you about my background, it's not because I'm a glutton for punishment. I decided to come out of retirement to help this firm for two reasons. First, because I was convinced this leadership team was thinking about this effort in the right way and was willing to do the hard work required to truly transform. They aren't defensive about where Citi has fallen short, nor are they looking for a quick fix. I can tell you this team is thoroughly humbled by the reprimands that we received, but the focus now is on how we move forward from here to strengthen Citi's risk and control environment and to change our operations in ways that will make the firm more effective, efficient, and competitive.
Second, I decided to take this role because I truly believe I can help and be effective here. I've experienced standing up efforts like this, and I know the rigor, the discipline, and the perseverance it takes to get something like this done. I know what new skills are needed, and I know how important it is to get the firm's veterans, those who have been here many years, involved and invested in this effort. I've learned more than a few hard lessons along the way, but I hope I can help Citi avoid those. Of course, there will be issues and obstacles here too, but I know that this is a marathon, not a sprint. I'm leading a team that will stay focused and deliver what needs to be done.
As I've already said to the team many times, one foot in front of the other, day in and day out. That's why I joined Citi, and the team and I have been hard at work ever since. As Jane mentioned earlier, much of the work I do is covered by the confidentiality rules of our regulators. We, what we have told you about the significant number of people we've hired to help with this multi-year effort, and I thought it would be useful to give you some color about what those teams are doing, a peek under the hood, if you will. A significant portion of these hires are working on our data efforts. Ironically, it's initially quite a manual process to build an agile data architecture. Existing data needs to be combed through and tagged consistently. Redundant data needs to be eliminated.
Data sources need to be validated and prioritized. We also need to update our systems and make sure the teams are appropriately trained on them. Separately, we have teams working on our end-to-end processes. In some cases, there are multiple ways around the firm to complete similar tasks. Take cross-border payments, for example, which you've heard a lot about. How we do it in our personal banking business might vary from how it's done on the institutional side. We're looking at what processes exist today and determining opportunities to do things in a more consistent way. We're looking at each of these steps. Can they be simplified? Do we have enough controls for each step or too many? Are they the right controls? Building the right end-to-end processes is an essential step to move forward from manual to automated ways of doing things.
Everyone intuitively understands the benefit of automation, but automating bad or overly complex processes won't achieve our desired outcomes. Once we have more and better end-to-end systems, we'll have better data that we can use more effectively. These efforts, like virtually all of our transformation work, are closely linked and connected. We're also strengthening Citi's project management capabilities to create centrally led discipline and structure around how we will get things done. Across our transformation efforts, we need to instill best practices, measure ourselves against consistent benchmarks, and streamline decision-making. Parts of my team are helping the firm do just this. This is particularly important because much of the work we're doing for the transformation has interdependencies and linkages across the firm, finance and risk, for example, compliance, and our first-line business leaders. Jane has often said that Citi has a love of customization.
That's actually not a great thing in banking. That's not the way we'll do things going forward. We're putting the right structure and support around developing these new standardized, consistent ways of working. Of course, we have been focused on meeting the expectations of our regulators to address the consent orders that we entered into with the FRB and the OCC in October of 2020. Our plans to address the consent orders were submitted to both regulators in the third quarter of last year, and we've been refining and executing on those plans with urgency, and we've brought in the resources we need to help us. We've added a lot of great talent that's done this in other places before, and they're helping us learn from those experiences while leveraging the great talent we have in-house.
I'll be frank, it's hard to do justice to the intensity of the work that's underway here and the passion our team is bringing to it. I am often in awe. This is a multi-year effort to enhance the way we manage risk end to end as we further enhance our culture of accountability to drive this change. I hope I was able to give you some texture of what's underway, the discipline we're embracing, and how we are investing in our people and technology to drive these transformation efforts to success. Now I'm going to turn it over to my colleague Stuart, who can tell you more about how we're using technology to support our transformation as well as our business growth. Stuart?
Thank you, Karen, and good afternoon, everyone. I'm Stuart Riley, and I'm the Head of ICG Technology. Over the last decade here at Citi, I've led many of the technology-enabled growth initiatives that have focused on digitizing our businesses. For example, leading the development of our number one-rated research and analytics platform, Citi Velocity. Across Citi Velocity and CitiDirect, last year alone, we had over 500,000 unique institutional users, we believe unmatched by any other firm. I'm a software engineer, and my whole career has been spent thinking about how you codify businesses and deliver them at scale. The traits that have made those projects successful are things like speed, connectivity, and reliability, and these are the characteristics that we want to apply across all parts of our firm. Today, you've heard from my colleagues about the growth initiatives across our businesses.
It's worth mentioning that two-thirds of our revenue growth in the next few years is driven by businesses that are fundamentally dependent on technology implementations. You've just heard from Karen about our transformation goals, including using technology to improve risk, controls, and efficiency. Earlier today, Jane talked about our aspirations to build a simpler bank while leveraging our unique global network. Those are both enabled by technology. Couple that with what our clients want from us. They want an optimized client experience, something as good, instantaneous, and easy to use as they have in their consumer lives. They want connectivity to be able to integrate their companies into ours, so that they can directly leverage our capabilities. Let me give you a quick example. When we build a complex pricing engine, they want to be able to use that on their platform.
They don't want to build that themselves. They don't want to acquire those datasets. We offer those services through connectivity. They want speed and reliability from us because it often dictates the speed and reliability of the services that they can offer on to their customers. Lastly, they want security. This is fundamentally about trust. Our customers trust us with their data because they know we will secure it for them. We have invested heavily in technology, talent, and infrastructure to support the growth and the transformation. Last year, we spent $10 billion on technology across Citi, and that includes the technology spend you heard about earlier from Shahmir and Anand that are key drivers for their businesses. This year, we've budgeted approximately $11 billion, which is a 30% increase compared to 2020.
That spend is split roughly equal between change the bank and run the bank activities. We've also increased our technology headcount by over 30% during that time, and that's been in a very competitive talent market. We now have over 30,000 software engineers. That's more than many of the leading tech giants. We're investing in that talent, including improving the developer experience and creating opportunities for broader industry recognition for our staff. Let me talk to you about some of the benefits from our technology investment. On the business-led investment side, we think across broad themes, such as digital customer and client distribution, from Shahmir's expansion of CitiDirect to Jim's mobile distribution channels.
We're improving our payment and lending capabilities by modernizing our platforms while also creating new products for our customers. On transformation, we're building the next generation cloud-based finance ledger and improving our risk technology to evaluate risk exposures much, much more rapidly and accurately. We're also using technology to automate our controls and our processes to reduce manual intervention and increase straight-through processing, thereby reducing the risk and improving our operating efficiency. We're also investing in our enterprise technology, the foundations, cloud, data, cybersecurity, and I'll talk to you more about those in detail later. Now, let me explain how we think about utilizing technology spend in a most effective way. We believe that we have three components that when combined, they're going to give us competitive edge. The first, leveraging new technologies. The second, improving delivery capability by changing the way we work.
Third, rapidly deploying our solutions across the Citi network. Clearly, every bank in the world, and all of my peers as technology heads, are going to tell you that they're leveraging new technology and finding new ways of working. I hear you. But Citi is different. We operate locally. We already have relationships with local regulators. We have relationships with central banks, and we have the talent, the infrastructure, and the technology on the ground. This means we can quickly deploy solutions to support our customer needs wherever they need us. Shahmir gave us an example of a company that uses us in 140 countries around the world. Jane Fraser also spoke about our uniquely global network. Technology powers that network, and it would be very difficult for others to replicate.
Now, I'm going to give you a little more information on each of these components over the next few slides. I want to start by showing you how our increased technology spend has improved our foundations, and therefore makes us confident that we can support the growth and the transformation. Cloud. A couple of years ago, we deliberately slowed our pace of cloud migration because we wanted to ensure that we met the highest standards of security. We are now running in public cloud. For example, we've used AWS for millions of hours of risk calculations in our markets business. That infrastructure is now available for us to leverage for any initiative where we need elastic scale. It's worth noting here that 25% of all of our applications in the ICG have already been migrated to a containerized architecture.
That means they're ready to be deployed on any cloud environment we choose. Data. In our view, the technology for artificial intelligence and machine learning is largely commoditized. The methodologies are readily available in open source or commercial products. The differentiator is how unique is your data and whether it is organized in a way that makes it discoverable and easily accessible. To do this, we're creating a high-quality, authoritative data source for both reference data and transaction data. These will feed into our risk and finance infrastructure so that we can guarantee the quality of regulatory and financial reporting. They're also key enablers for bringing new products and services to market and improving the customer experience. For example, using machine learning, we are better at detecting potential card fraud, and that reduces the alerts to our operational staff. You may think, so what?
It means 100 million fewer alerts reaching those operational teams every year. Think about the time and the effort we save. APIs. APIs are the modern-day relationship between companies. Of course, human relationships remain critically important, but APIs are the physical connection between our firms. They enable customers to directly access our IP, our data, and our compute services, and they can do that at the pace and frequency they require. We handled over 8 billion requests from our customers in 2021. That was across 300 different APIs. They span from things like consumer APIs to transfer money and pay bills, to market data APIs, to access over 25 million pieces of data that is exclusive to Citi. Everything as code.
As we operate in a highly regulated industry, and given our ambitions for risk and compliance, we want to enforce the highest levels of controls and ethics. The only way to do that and avoid the reliance on the good intentions of humans and to operate at the speed and scale that our customers demand is to ensure that the rules are well-defined and embedded in our systems. For example, we codified the rules around trade booking so that thousands of trades can be checked and booked every second, and we're now able to apply that technology to other business lines where similar throughput is required. Finally, cyber. We now leverage artificial intelligence on over 740,000 Citi devices that better protect Citi and our customers from emerging threats, including ransomware and malware.
Our new secure authentication platform means that we have better login experience for nearly 20 million of our customers, while simultaneously improving security on both sides. As well as investing in technology, we're also changing the way we work. Firstly, we're going to deliver our business capabilities through services, creating the efficient and simpler bank that Jane talked about earlier. Let me explain why. Historically, we covered our clients' needs vertically through products. This has increased complexity because it caused duplication and delivered inconsistent experiences. We know that within the bank, we provide many services, and going forward, we're going to better align to those. Those services will be easier to govern, we will be able to reduce that duplication, and the owners will be empowered to be much more agile. Those services will be built with the everything-as-code concept. They'll be fully automated, highly controlled, and fully evidenceable.
Secondly, we're actively scouting, piloting, and partnering with startups, especially in areas that help accelerate our execution strategy. At times, we also invest in these companies, which is the case in the examples on this slide. We've developed a strong reputation with entrepreneurs and the venture capital community because Citi is able to deliver our breadth and scale to the startup partner, and in return, we collaborate on the product development suited to Citi's needs. We have over 100 such investments today. According to CB Insights, last year we were the most active bank in fintech venture capital investing. Finally, in the same way that Karen laid out how we are approaching transformation differently, we are also rebuilding certain client-facing services where we need scale, speed, and agility, and we're doing this through a new operating model. This is based on three main principles.
First, dedicated cross-functional teams. We bring everyone together, business, risk, finance, legal, technology, operations, which means better and faster decision-making. Secondly, that team will be aligned to clear and achievable common business goals, ensuring that we can track and achieve the appropriate returns on those investments. Third, every service that the team build will be designed to be reusable, which will further increase our agility and speed of innovation. As these services will be built on the new technologies, it will enable us to ultimately scale our businesses at lower marginal cost. Our customers will benefit from faster time to market and, importantly, higher quality products and, of course, improving the customer experience. Now, I talked earlier about how our customers' needs have evolved.
It's meant a shift away from the traditional high-value, low-volume businesses, such as treasury or hedging, to a much more e-commerce or B2C flows. This tends to result in far higher volumes and lower notional transaction sizes. Of course, nowhere has this been more apparent than in digital commerce. We've been working on a project called Payments Express, a new cloud-based, API-enabled instant payments platform, and it's specifically targeted at these digital commerce clients. Now, it's worth remembering that Shahmir mentioned earlier, we are already the largest payment provider in the world. By applying the technologies and the approaches that we've discussed today, we will be delivering a platform that will increase our payment capacity by over 100 x. It will also be the fastest time to market of a substantial client offering.
We started at the beginning of the year, and we aim to go live in two major markets within a year. We will then rapidly expand to cover our clients' growing digital commerce needs in up to 30 markets over the next few years, covering over 90% of the expected flows. This highlights the power of the Citi network. Again, it's hard to expand this quickly if you don't already have the people, the infrastructure, and the relationships on the ground. Finally, I should mention that the cross-functional team working on this project includes risk and compliance so that we can codify related policies and eliminate all manual intervention. This means that we can achieve the level of client experience and throughput we require. What we learn, we can feed back into our broader transformation program. Let me summarize.
We have invested, and we continue to invest in the technology to deliver the foundations that form the basis of all of our plans. Alongside this, we are partnering with the ecosystem and improving our delivery. Technology plays a critical role in deploying our solutions globally, allowing us to harness the power of the Citi network. Ultimately, our technology investment will ensure that we deliver on the transformation areas Karen spoke about, that we empower the company for more profitable growth, and that we create and maintain the competitive advantage that brings customers to Citi. Thank you very much. Now let me hand over the stage to Mark Mason.
Good afternoon, everyone. Well, we've made it to the final presentation of the day. For those of you who I haven't met, I'm Mark Mason. I'm Citi's Chief Financial Officer. I've been CFO for three years, and with the firm for about 21 years. Since joining Citi, I've had the opportunity to work across a number of businesses. That includes leading our global private bank and running Citi Holdings through the financial crisis. I've also been the CFO of our global wealth management business and our ICG franchise. In my 21 years at Citi, there have been a number of memorable moments, and now I'll add our 2022 Investor Day to that list. Not just because I caught COVID from Paco, but let me tell you why.
The firm has faced many ups and downs over the course of my career here, and it's clear we have challenges that we need to urgently address right now. You know that, and we know that. Today is our opportunity to show you that we're determined to drive that change, and that we're confident we're ready to tackle the challenges and take on the opportunities that lie ahead. That determination, that confidence, it comes from being surrounded by colleagues who have the drive to compete and win, from having leaders who are willing to be the change agents our firm needs, and from having a clear strategy that's focused on where we can win. Now, this is not a quick fix. Jane was candid with you about that this morning, and I'm underscoring it now.
We're clear-eyed about that, but we're executing a credible, sustainable plan that will allow us to improve our returns over time. Although we recognize our journey won't always be a straight line, we'll be highly disciplined about the progress we need to make in three key phases. Each phase is clearly centered on our long-term strategy, execution, and accountability. Each phase builds on the next, and they include KPIs we and you will use to track our progress. As we developed this plan, we challenged ourselves to be realistic about what's achievable given where we are now and the work we have to do. We also pushed ourselves to be appropriately ambitious, to challenge our firm and our people with goals that will require hard work and new approaches.
I believe, we believe, that our plan strikes the right balance between the two and that we're on the right path. Let's talk about strategy. A higher quality earnings mix, stronger returns, a lower cost of equity, a platform for future growth. That defines the scale of our ambition. To achieve these financial goals, we'll do three things. First, grow. We've had limited revenue growth in recent years. We know we need to change that, and we will. We're investing in our fastest-growing, highest-returning businesses, like services and wealth. We're strengthening and optimizing banking, markets, and personal banking, where we have a competitive advantage. We're also positioning ourselves to benefit from tailwinds as the economy normalizes over the next few years. Second, become more efficient. The investments we're making in the transformation will ensure that we meet our risk and control commitments.
Just as important, these investments will upgrade our technology, modernize our systems, and simplify our operating model. That'll make us more agile, more scalable, and well-controlled for the digital age. Third, manage our capital to drive improved returns. This means allocating more capital to support our growth businesses, but it also means improving the productivity of our more capital-intensive businesses. Importantly, it means returning excess capital to our shareholders. Let me take you through the three phases of our plan. First, as the old saying goes, you can't really know where you're going until you know where you've been. I'll start with a review of our recent financial performance and what created the gap between us and our peers. Any way you cut it, you'll see there's a lot of room for improvement. That's exactly what we've been up to over the past year.
I'll quickly recap what we're doing to address those challenges and what that means for our financial results this year. I'll go into detail about what to expect from us in the medium term and beyond. Let's start with a look back. From 2017 - 2019, we grew revenues by $1.4 billion. We kept expenses relatively flat. In 2019, we delivered an ROTCE of 12.1%. The pandemic hit. Initially, 2020's unprecedented volatility drove strong performance in our markets business, and that offset the impact of the pandemic on our NII, which dropped to $45 billion. That was a result of lower rates and balances in our consumer business.
As the pandemic continued into 2021, the impact of lower cards balances and the effect on our interest rate-sensitive businesses became even more acute and resulted in NII decreasing by roughly $2.3 billion. Then our challenges were compounded by the consent orders, which reflected the consequences of under-investing in our infrastructure and some of our businesses. You can clearly see that reflected in our expenses beginning in 2020. That's when we started the work we're doing to modernize our operations and build a bank that will deliver over the long term. This increase in expenses, coupled with the pressure on our NII, offset by significant reserve releases, resulted in an ROTCE of 13.4% in 2021, or about 9% if you exclude those releases. Now let's take a closer look at how the pandemic affected our balance sheet.
From 2017- 2019, we grew loans by about 2% and deposits by about 6%. We did that as we continued to acquire new clients while meeting the needs of our existing clients and customers. In 2020 and 2021, you can start to see the impact of the pandemic play out. During that period, we saw an extraordinary outlay in government stimulus and Fed balance sheet expansion. That helped both consumers and corporates strengthen their balance sheets and increase their savings and liquidity profile. For consumers, that translated into elevated payment rates and lower cards receivables. For corporates, it meant a significant shift to debt capital market financing. Consequently, loans decreased by a CAGR of 3%, and we saw significant deposit growth.
As these dynamics played out, we continued to maintain a strong balance sheet with about 83% of our corporate loans in investment grade and 82% of our consumer loans to prime customers. On the deposit side, we continue to maintain high-quality, stable deposits as we act as a primary operating bank for the majority of our clients. This is reflected in our LCR calculations you see on the bottom right-hand side, with a significant portion receiving a haircut of 25% or less. The combination of these factors means we have a strong balance sheet that we can deploy to support our strategy. Over the course of the pandemic, our capital position remained strong too. At the end of 2021, as we prepared for SCB implementation on January first, we had a CET1 ratio of 12.2%.
Our other capital and liquidity metrics were strong too. As you can see on the right side, we've returned a substantial amount of capital to our shareholders, about $80 billion over the past five years. We've grown our tangible book value per share at about a 7% CAGR over the past five years. This slide compares Citi's performance over the past five years to our peers. Let me summarize the reason for our underperformance using the earlier themes of growth, efficiency, and capital. Our revenue growth has been slower than our peers, and that's partly a result of our business mix. As you can see, only 38% of our revenue comes from non-interest revenue. Our operating efficiency and absolute expense growth declined 1% until 2019. As I said earlier, that's because we just didn't invest enough.
While we've returned a significant amount of capital to shareholders, the productivity of the capital we allocate across our businesses has been low. This is in part due to the amount of capital that we hold in corporate and the fact that we over-index to markets. As a result of these factors, over the last few years, we've produced returns of 10% on average. That compares to an average of about 13% for our peers. Now, the reality is that until we address the challenges we face, we won't meaningfully narrow the gap to our peers. That isn't a reality we like or that we're comfortable with.
It is our reality given the work we need to do on our transformation, given what we need to do to make up for the past underinvestment in our businesses, and given the time required for our strategy to really start to deliver. It's the reality of what's needed to run the bank the right way, to position us well for the long term, and to deliver better and more sustainable returns over time. Let's take a look at how that plays out over the three phases. Phase I is well underway, and we've been hard at work over the last year. We completed our strategy refresh. We're executing against our divestitures at a rapid pace, and we're already implementing our strategy across our five core businesses.
That includes investing wisely to reinforce and capitalize on our competitive advantages, and we're also instilling more rigor and discipline to drive better performance. Very importantly, during this phase, we've been doing a meaningful amount of work on our transformation. You heard that from Karen and from Stuart. The work and the investments we're putting in now will start to show more benefits in the next phase. In phase II, meaning in three - five years, we believe we can deliver an ROTCE of 11%-12%. That's when efficiencies from the transformation begin to materialize and our investments in our businesses start to pay off with greater revenues. It's at that point that we'll begin to see the early benefits of our shifting business mix. Our more fee-driven and capital-light businesses like services and wealth will grow and start to become a greater proportion of our earnings.
As that dynamic plays out, it should drive a lower cost of equity. That's when in phase III, we'll see the full benefits of our strategy in the form of a simpler, more efficient, more focused organization that's generating higher returns. Let's dig deeper into each phase. Our strategy refresh was an essential part of this first phase of work, and it gives us the strong foundation we need to build from. Our work on the strategy led us to the decision to divest 14 consumer franchises. The focus of our work was squarely on the bank we wanted to be going forward, a simpler, focused, and connected bank. As you heard today, our approach is now built around five interconnected businesses and a client segment with high growth potential. They're all positioned to be leaders in their own right and they'll benefit as the macro environment improves.
These businesses also create value from being part of the broader Citi franchise. You've heard from our team, for example, how our Commercial Bank is high returning on its own and how it can also be a feeder into the corporate bank or into wealth or vice versa. You've heard how our TTS and markets businesses operate a joint venture to deliver embedded FX services to our clients. That JV generates approximately $1.5 billion in revenues for us. You've heard how our retail banking business generated 50,000 referrals to our wealth business just last year. You've also heard about the $1 billion in markets revenues we earn from private bank clients, and that's just the beginning. By strengthening these linkages and by sharpening our synergies, we'll open up new opportunities to both serve our existing clients and win new ones.
A missed opportunity for us in the past was our failure to take full advantage of the natural linkages that exist among our businesses. Now, those linkages and synergies are central to our strategy. There's no doubt about it, we have things we need to fix. The approach we're taking with our investments goes well beyond that. We want to be more competitive, to put ourselves in a position to win for the long term. To call it like it is, that means we need to invest significantly over the next couple of years. As responsible stewards of your capital, we owe it to you to explain where those investments are going and what we expect to get from them. On the right-hand side of the slide, you can see the breakdown of our expenses.
First, there are expenses related to our legacy franchises in Asia and Mexico. We're going to drive these expenses out of the firm over time as we make those exits. Next, expenses related to our transformation, and I'll take you through that in greater detail in a moment. Then there are business-led investments, which accounted for 7% of our total spend in 2021. This includes spending on front office talent as well as technology, and in some cases, incremental marketing as we launch new products. When it comes to front office investments, our strategy includes continuing to attract and develop key talent and paying competitively for performance. The next category is volume-related costs, the good cholesterol. These costs have increased recently because of the heightened client activity we've experienced during the pandemic. Then there are structural costs of approximately $27 billion.
By structural, I mean expenses related to our people, our real estate, operations, and functions. These costs, frankly, are just too high. We're making it a priority to bring them down over time, including by becoming a leaner, flatter organization, which Jane referenced earlier as one of our top priorities. Across most of these categories are investments in technology. In fact, total technology spend throughout the firm was about $10 billion in 2021. That's up about 10% year-over-year. That splits roughly 50/50 between run the bank and change the bank initiatives. Given how important technology is to the future of our firm, I'd expect our total technology spend and the share of spend in change the bank to continue to grow. Now, let me give you some more detail on our transformation expenses.
By now I'm sure you've noticed that we've taken our consent orders and the requirements associated with them and made them the heart of our broader transformation program. That's because we're not approaching this work as just an exercise in remediation. That would not make sense for our firm or for our shareholders in the long run. Instead, we're addressing root cause issues because our safety and soundness and a strong risk and control environment are non-negotiables, and because anything less would undermine the value of the investments we're making. This approach will help us avoid making the same mistakes again. It'll also make us more efficient and more competitive over time, and that'll lead to better performance. Let's take a look at how we're investing in our transformation. We break it down by technology, third party, and compensation.
I'd like to draw your attention to the shift this year from third party to compensation and technology. This is because consultants and advisors who assisted us with the planning phase are now rolling off. We needed resources to respond to the consent orders quickly, and that included tapping into the expertise of advisors who've helped other banks with similar efforts. We're now focused on building the right tools and talent internally to sustain this effort. As this work moves forward, we expect transformation investments to account for a 3%-4% increase in total expenses this year. Over time, we'll see tangible benefits across the firm, and that'll make us easier to manage and easier to do business with. Now, let's take a look at how we're investing in our businesses. Let's start with the areas where we're trying to accelerate growth.
Services and wealth are high-returning businesses that generate significant fee revenue and have synergies with the rest of our franchise. We're already a clear leader in TTS. This is a high-returning business, and it has strong drivers, levered towards rising rates and an improving economy. We're not taking our leadership position here for granted, not for a minute. We know that our competitors and disruptors are knocking at the door, so we're committed to defending and extending our leadership position here. What makes us unique? Our solutions embed us into the operations of our clients in a way that allows us to help them with their greatest challenges. That's not enough. As Shahmir explained, we're going to keep investing. Those investments will go towards improving the client experience.
We're also enhancing our technology infrastructure, so we can capture more cross-border transaction volumes, more U.S. dollar clearing volumes, and more deposits. In Securities Services, we've been investing in our capabilities as well as our ability to add scale. We already have the number one direct custody business, and we're building out our global capabilities to become the only truly integrated global custodian. The investments we've already started to make have given us a lot of momentum. The major custodial mandates that we recently won from some of our big FI clients are just one example. In Wealth, our investments relate primarily to technology and talent. On the tech side, we're integrating our Wealth businesses on a single platform, enhancing our product capabilities, improving the digital experience for clients, and giving our advisors better tools to manage their client relationships.
On the talent side, we're hiring more advisors to drive client acquisition, and we're off to a good start here. As Jim said, in 2021, we added more than 400 advisors, an increase of nearly 20% versus the prior year. Overall, wealth is a great example of a business where we believe we can get significant upside at high marginal returns. With respect to the commercial bank, as you heard Jane and Tasnim explain, our plan is to expand our share with middle-market clients who are going global at a record pace. Those benefits will cut across a number of our businesses. Like wealth, much of the investments will go towards talent to attract new clients and deepen relationships with existing ones. That's because we already have most of what's needed to service this client segment through our TTS and banking businesses.
As you can see, TTS, Securities Services, and Global Wealth Management delivered an ROTCE of 20% or above over the last five years. Next, let's take a look at the investments we're making in banking, markets, and U.S. Personal Banking. The objective here is to maintain and extend our leadership position in these franchises. In investment banking, our goal is to grow with clients leading the new economy. We're putting a big emphasis on clients who are in industries that are converging, such as tech and healthcare. That convergence creates quite a range of opportunities where our advice and support are needed. The videos we watched earlier featuring Blackstone and Flywire are compelling examples of the value we provide to our clients. It's clear this is a relationship business, and that means we need to invest in talent with established reputations in these segments.
Our markets business constitutes a big part of our bank, and that impacts our returns. As Paco described, we're focused on optimizing our capital while also shifting towards higher margin activity, such as client-led financing and syndicated and other episodic transactions. Overall, we're focused on profitable growth and improving the returns of our markets franchise over time. We also recognize that our markets business adds value to our firm more broadly. Markets is an integral part of our strategy, and it provides critical services to our clients in partnership with other parts of our franchise, like TTS, Securities Services, and banking. We believe there's a significant opportunity to get more out of these natural linkages as we continue to become a more client-centric organization. In our U.S. Personal Banking business, we're investing to stay ahead of our rapidly changing consumer preferences and competitive dynamics.
As Anand explained, those investments are about maintaining a compelling and competitive offering for our customers, including more borrowing options and competitive rewards. Specifically, we're investing to accelerate our growth in proprietary cards, to deepen our penetration in our six core retail markets, and to continue to invest in digital capabilities. Before I move on, let me give you some sense for how we're evaluating, managing, and monitoring investments. As we develop the strategy for the firm and the businesses, each business was required to bring Jane and me a fully developed business case for their investment asks. Our key criteria included strategic relevance, expected return, and feasibility of successful execution. This approach allowed us to compare priorities and double down and redirect resources to the best opportunities, and that's what we did. Going forward, we will be monitoring the progress on a monthly basis and holding our managers accountable.
Importantly, today we provided KPIs for our businesses that link to these investments and revenue performance over time, and we'll regularly update you on our progress on these KPIs so you can hold us accountable. Let's talk about guidance for the year. In this phase I of our work, we're already starting to drive more value out of our businesses, and we're benefiting from improving macro conditions. With that said, we expect first quarter revenues from markets and investment banking to be down as the unprecedented activity we experienced over the past two years continues to normalize. That will lead to a decline in total revenues in the first quarter in the mid-single digit range. Over the rest of the year, we anticipate that higher rates, continued loan growth in ICG, a recovery in consumer borrowing, and continued fee momentum will drive growth across the firm.
This leads us to expect top line revenue growth in 2022 in the low single digit range. That, of course, excludes any one-time items related to the exits. I've walked you through the investments we're making across the firm. Those investments contribute to the roughly 5%-6% increase in total expenses that we anticipate this year, as you can see on the right-hand side of the slide. Excluding the cost of the career voluntary retirement program that we incurred last year, this increase would be 7%-8%. Our increase in expenses takes into account some of the revenue-related volume growth we're expecting this year as well. Structural expenses, which includes things like inflation and non-transformation risk and controls costs, will decrease slightly, largely because of the absence of the $1.2 billion in impacts from last year's divestitures.
For the first quarter, we expect expenses to be up 10%-12%, excluding any impact from the consumer divestitures. This reflects the annualization of the ramp-up in investments we saw in the second half of last year, as well as additional hiring in the first quarter related to the transformation. We're increasing expenses meaningfully in the near term for all the reasons that I outlined. As I mentioned before, our expenses will normalize during phase II , and I'll go into this in more detail in just a bit. Turning to our cost of credit. We continue to maintain a strong credit profile in our portfolio. You can see that on the left-hand side, where our customers in branded cards and retail services are overwhelmingly prime borrowers. On the right-hand side, you can see that our current reserve levels are quite strong.
As the macro environment continues to improve, we expect to release additional reserves this year, albeit less than what we released in 2021. We also expect that payment rates will start to normalize. As they do, loan balances will increase, and we'll build our reserves to account for that. As people begin to borrow again, we also expect delinquencies and losses to return to more normal levels. As we think about our capital generation over the next year, we expect capital to come from earnings, disallowed DTA, exits, and the wind down of our legacy assets. Our approach to managing our capital this year takes into account several key factors. First, we have to build our CET1 ratio to 12% as we prepare for an increase in our G-SIB surcharge to 3.5%.
Second, we're prioritizing allocating capital in a way that is consistent with our strategy and accretive to shareholder value. Third, any excess capital will be returned to shareholders. However, the timing and level of return of capital is going to be impacted by the consumer exits, including Mexico, as well as other macro factors. In the appendix, we've laid out a rough timeline for the key transactions we have in play, and you'll see that we expect a number of them to close this year. Of course, our capital return will be subject to this year's stress test results. That's phase I , which is all about executing and investing. Now let's move on to phase II , where I'll cover our path to medium-term targets.
As you can see from this slide, in the next three-five years, we expect revenue growth to accelerate across all five of our core businesses and to grow 4%-5% for the firm overall. Banking is expected to grow in the low single digits, Markets in the mid single digits, Wealth in the high single digits to low teens, and our other businesses in the high single digits. Now, I realize these are meaningful growth expectations, so I want to give you some more color on what's driving them. We expect revenue growth to come largely from four drivers. Interest rate increases, a recovery in consumer lending, scale businesses where we're seeking targeted share gains, and businesses where we're investing to accelerate growth. Let's quickly go through each.
As interest rates normalize, we'll see revenue growth given the interest rate sensitive assets and liabilities on our balance sheet. We also expect to see a recovery in our consumer lending business, especially around cars. As payment rates decline, balances will start to normalize, and the interest on those balances will flow through to the top line. Growth will also come from those businesses where we're seeking targeted share gains, like banking and markets. Finally, our investments in those businesses where we're looking to accelerate growth, particularly services and wealth, will generate high-quality revenue growth. As you can see, these four drivers are influenced by both improvements in the macro environment as well as by our performance. Now, let's talk about expenses. As I mentioned earlier, we expect expenses will rise in the near term and normalize over the medium term.
It's during this medium term that our transformation will start to pay off. Starting in the phase II of our plan, we'll have strengthened our own bench of talent and started benefiting from our earlier tech spend, and we'll start to see some efficiencies play out as well. That should translate into an efficiency ratio that is less than 60%. As we execute against our strategy, we'll allocate capital to areas of the firm with the greatest growth potential, or we'll return it to our shareholders. As you can see on the bottom of the slide, we have a significant amount of capital that's tied up in unproductive uses. This includes disallowed DTAs and other assets, as well as our legacy franchises. We're focused on freeing up this capital and reducing its impact on our returns.
I've given you some of the highlights on this slide already, but let's go into a little more detail. We're building to a CET1 ratio of 12% as we prepare for our G-SIB surcharge to increase. That said, we continue to feel the prudent level to run our firm is approximately 11.5%. Our exits will help ease upward pressure on our G-SIB score. Specifically, we expect our G-SIB to go down by 25 points as we close those transactions. We're also shifting our business mix through both our growth strategy and our divestitures, which will ensure more durable PPNR over time. That should fundamentally help bring down our SCB over time, recognizing that stress scenarios and the Fed's modeling are unpredictable in any particular cycle.
That said, for the medium term, we've not assumed that we get back to the 11.5% fully. Rather, we assume a CET1 target range of 11.5%-12%. As we have the opportunity to return capital to you, we'll continue to prioritize share repurchases. Let's put all that together to lay out a walk to our medium-term return target range. The starting point of our normalized returns is roughly 9% for 2021, which excludes the ACL releases. Over the medium term, we expect ICG to contribute between 180 and 220 basis points of improvements to our ROTCE. That will come through a combination of NII and NIR growth, reflecting the benefits of our investments in services, as well as continued fee momentum.
We expect PBWM to contribute 105-125 basis points of improvement to our ROTCE. That will come primarily from a recovery in consumer lending, but also from our investments in wealth. All of this assumes a healthy economic backdrop, a combination of loan growth and higher rates offset by some normalization in the cost of credit and steady execution against our strategy. Taken together, the revenue growth, the expense trajectory, the early benefits of our shifting business mix, we believe there's a credible path to achieving higher returns in the range of 11%-12% in three-five years. Before I wrap up, let's take a look at the longer-term outlook, phase III . We've made bold choices about the firm we want to be going forward.
We've launched our transformation, our highest priority, which will give us the agility and scale to better compete. We've identified our growth engines, and as we invest behind them, they will capture more share and increase in scale, and we will grow their profitability and their contribution to our overall earnings. In banking, markets, and personal banking, we'll take share, drive profitability, and create more shareholder value. In this tphase III of our plan, the strategy we're executing will shift our business mix and lead to faster-growing returns. Bring those pieces together, and you have our longer-term outlook for our firm, a global bank that's centered on a very strong mix of growing, interconnected businesses that drive higher returns, lower our cost of equity, and increase shareholder value. I hope you now have a full picture of the journey we're on.
As you can see, it's going to take some time before we fully achieve the ambitions that we have for Citi. There will be progress during each of these phases that I've taken you through. The plan is appropriately ambitious and, at the same time, it's realistic. We're determined to earn your confidence in our plan, which is why we've given you all the metrics you need to track our progress and hold us accountable. We strongly believe in our strategy and in our ability to meet our medium-term targets, and therefore, we believe there is significant upside. I've been at Citi for many years. I've been here for some of the best of times and some of the toughest, and I'm truly excited by this moment.
I don't think we've ever been clear about the bank that we want Citi to be and what it'll take for us to get there. We have the vision, we have the conviction, we have the right plan, and step by step, we're committed to proving that to you.
Welcome back, everyone. We are now gonna start Q&A. As a reminder, please use the Zoom link if you would like to ask a question and raise your hand on Zoom. With that, I think we'll open it up for questions.
First question is going to go to Glenn Schorr from Evercore ISI.
Hello, thanks very much. Appreciate it. Okay, so I like all the numbers. I appreciate the walkthrough. The 2022 expense guide, first, a point of clarification. I think on slide 17, one part said up 5%-6% ex Asia, divestitures, and one part said up 7%-8%. I just wanna clarify the 5%-6% versus 7%-8%.
Yep. Good morning, or good afternoon, Glenn. It's Mark here. Let me just clarify. You're right. On page 17, we show the up 5%-6%, excluding the divestiture impacts in 2022. Only those that are in 2022. The 7%-8% reflects the exclusion of the divestiture impacts both in 2022 and those that we incurred in 2021. Right? We had the Korea, you know, sale in 2021, so that explains-
Yeah
the difference in the two.
Okay. I appreciate that. The furthering that question is if we look through, I love slide 32 that has the medium-term walk by P&L. It has expenses as additive to your ROTCE build at 20-70 basis points. It's as simple as saying that means after the buildup in expenses in 2022 and probably 2023, all the expenses going into the transformation or the operating leverage will kick in, and you think 2024 and beyond, expenses will be below 2021? I hope I'm not putting too many words in your mouth.
That's too many words. We do expect to see benefits in the expense level in the medium term, and that's what that reflects. If you look at the stacked bar that we showed on the prior pages, on page 23, you see the expense levels starting to tick down in that medium term, and that's some of the contribution that you see to the returns. It won't be as low as the 2021 number. Those would be words that you were putting into my mouth.
Okay, it's an operating leverage thing, not an absolute dollar thing. Either way, I think people will be cool with it. Maybe just one last one. It looks like, same slide, you were incorporating 7 rate hikes across 2022 and 2023, which is what it is. I'm curious on the 6%-7% loan growth, how much of that is coming from cards versus, say, leveraged finance and ICG and things like that you talked about?
I can try and pull the specific breakdown. What I'd say is that we are looking for the rebound in card loan volumes, and that's both on the heels of the overall recovery, but the fact that we've been investing marketing dollars and acquisition of new card customers. There'll be a fair amount of contribution from both the cards as well as on the ICG side in the way of trade loans and other lending activity that we do there. Anand or Paco, I don't know if you wanna add anything specific to either of those portfolios, but it is a contribution from both, Glenn.
They're both saying you got that one right, Mark.
Okay.
Well done, big guy.
Thank you. Thank you.
Next question is gonna come from Mike Mayo from Wells Fargo Securities, and that will be followed by Erika Najarian from UBS. Mike, you may proceed.
Hey, my first question is for Mark and then for Jane. Mark, when you look at the total transformation costs, I guess going from $2 billion up to $3-$3.5 billion this year, when all said and done, does this get close to, like, $10 billion? Back to the prior question, putting words in your mouth, should these transformation costs peak in 2022?
You know, what I'd say is, look, we've been very transparent with you as we've dimensioned these expenses and cost and investments that we're making. I've given you an outlook for 2022. I'm not gonna give transformation guidance beyond that. You know this, Mike. I mean, others have been through this, and I'd like to avoid mistakes that others have made in trying to give guidance prematurely on such an important initiative that's a multiyear journey. 2022, $3-$3.5 billion in that medium term, as I've talked about, starting to see some of those benefits play out and some of those efficiencies come through.
As we get closer to each of the quarters ahead of us and the year ahead of us, I'll give you more detail and guidance on how we see that evolving. That's where we are at this stage.
For Jane, the big question is, why is this time different? I mean, this is not exactly Citi's first investor day when we've heard targets and transformations and more spending and ROTCE targets. I do appreciate that you used the words, you know, failed and underperformed more than I've ever heard at Citi. It sounds like you said you're not being defensive. You know, so why is this time going to be different than all the other investor days that we've been through or all the other management presentations literally since 1998? Thanks.
Well, always great to see you, Mike, and thank you so much for dressing up for the occasion. In terms of our plan, what you also heard today were words like conviction and confidence. We have a very credible strategy and plan, and one you've heard from the whole management team. We've spent a year putting a lot of work and effort in to make sure it will indeed be something that we have high conviction that we will deliver. If you break it down, we have some terrific businesses you heard about today, and we're making a number of smart, targeted investments and bets into businesses such as TTS, into our wealth franchise, into Commercial Bank. Those ones I particularly like because they're ones where we can see a very clear growth path for them.
They're high return, they've got good growth prospects, but also they're ones that we can leverage our existing platforms in ICG in particular and parts of our consumer franchise against. This is a well-thought-through strategy which we have tremendous conviction behind. The second piece, as I said in my opening, we put a lot of thought into the root causes as to what it was that had held us back from fulfilling our full potential in the past, and we've put together an execution plan and a plan to tackle those issues head-on from the transformation program, addressing the consent orders, simplifying the bank, improving our operations, and addressing our culture.
You bring all of those different pieces together, and I have a team assembled who've been picked because of their expertise, fresh perspectives, and because of their drive and determination, and we will deliver, Mike.
If you can just explain the gateway that TTS and Services is to the rest of ICG. I think that's underappreciated and misunderstood since that's now the first financial data that you're disclosing.
Yeah. I will pass that one to Paco in a moment, but I think what you heard loud and clear today, TTS and our global network and the services strategy is the crown jewel of Citi. It sits at the heart of the global network. It's not just a product platform. It also incorporates the people that we have on the ground, the knowledge that we have, the relationships we have, and decades of experience, as well as the technology, the data, and the client relationships. Let me pass it to Paco just to go over where he sees this being this critical gateway, but you've got some pretty interesting data that we've provided you today to show you why we're so excited about TTS and services. Paco, my friend, over to you.
Thank you, Jane. Mike, as you've heard us saying in Services, we try to help our clients become more efficient. The Services business links those clients operationally to us. They create a very deep relationship, a very connected relationship. Once we are together, we tend to be together for a very long time, and that's a relationship that can be built and used across all the activities that we have in ICG. Beyond that, there is also a product connection, a platform connection. Securities Services, for instance, is very connected to execution. We're in a very good position to grow our securities business, in part because we have one of the largest execution engines in the industry.
also in TTS, we can do things in cross-border payments that would be almost impossible for us to do if we didn't have the best FX business that you can find, to partner with. There is the client connection and the fact that we build a very strong relationship with the client that is then leveraged across the ICG, but it's also the product connection, that we have tried to describe in the presentation.
Thank you.
Next question is gonna go to Erika Najarian from UBS, and that'll be followed by Ebrahim Poonawala from Bank of America. Erika, you may proceed.
Hi, everybody, and thank you for a refreshed realistic tone on the outlook today. Jane, this first question is for you and Karen. We completely appreciate that the remediation process of the regulators is an inherently confidential process. That being said, what are the mile markers that we need to look at in terms of measuring your progress and remediation that you could share with us publicly? If you could give us a sense of what the next steps are since you submitted the plan in 3Q 2021. Also, if you can at all, give us a sense of, you know, how much more work is to be done until you could say, "All right, all the, you know, the big changes, the tall trees are cut and behind us.
Oh, well, Erika, lovely to see you, and thank you so much for joining. When we look at the consent orders in the context of the broader transformation, we've talked about this being the firm's number one priority, and it's something that affects not only the safety and soundness and the risk and control environment, but also the investments that we're making in the operations, and the changes in the culture that we're making. I see them being inherently linked together, benefiting not only our regulatory responsibilities, but also those for our shareholders and for our clients. As you say, this is confidential supervisory information, so we're limited in what we can talk about. We submitted the plan in September last year.
We've had a lot of very constructive, I would say very helpful dialogue with our regulators. We are incorporating their feedback into our plan as we go. This will be a multi-year program, but it's one that we are now firmly down the execution path in. Something that I spent a lot of my days involved in, that we put a lot of time into looking really maniacally at the details of what's working, how are the investments going, where is it we've got the right technology investments, what are the resources that are needed. It's got attention from the whole management team, and our board is constantly challenging us as to making sure that we're making the progress that should be expected.
We will provide you a few more metrics on our execution in the proxy, and these are in line with some of the ones the board is using to hold us to account, and the street should hold us to account as well.
Got it. My second question is on the longer term vision for Citi. You know, you laid out a medium-term ROTCE path and, you know, Mark said something, you know, striking that you do have the operating deposit accounts for most of your clients on the corporate side. That said, in Anand's presentation, it did stick out to me that you had $117 billion of U.S. personal non-wealth deposits. I'm wondering, as you think about that natural funding gap to peers, what is your long-term vision in terms of deposit taking, retail deposit taking, checking account growth in U.S. Personal Banking?
Why don't we pass this one over to Anand, who has certainly been living this one. You will have also seen, Erika, today as we're talking about it, you know, the very strong deposit gathering capabilities that we also have in wealth management and in TTS. You know, we are benefited by the luxury of multiple different engines here on deposit gathering. Anand, do you wanna talk specifically on the U.S. front?
Thank you, Jane. Hi, Erika. From a U.S. perspective, as I had said in my presentation, we are refocusing our retail bank to get or to maximize the value there. As you've seen the last three years, we've grown our deposits 35%.
Mm.
Versus a declining trend, 2016 - 2018. We're able to do that by bringing more productivity from our branches and growing our digital capabilities. As we look ahead, the way we look at retail bank is threefold. It's a powerful feeder to our wealth business. We saw that 70% of our affluent customers in the wealth business was acquired through our retail bank. It's a great source of funding for our payments and lending business. More importantly, what we're trying to do is we're trying to get more value from our retail network, so more lending, mortgages, small business, personal installment loans, and that's what we'll build and our digital capabilities. We have grown digital deposits $20 billion, 3x over the last three years.
We feel good about, you know, the capabilities that we already have, and we'll continue to build on those. From that perspective, that's how we're thinking of retail bank, a good powerful driver of the two growth priorities that we have. It's wealth and payments and lending, and complement that with our digital capabilities.
Erika, this is Mark. Good afternoon, and thanks again for joining. The only thing I'd add to Anand's comment is, one, as you know, this is a relationship business for us, both on the retail banking side as well as in our services TTS business. So that drives the primary engagement that we'll have, and we've taken in a good amount of deposits over the past number of years, and as the strategy would suggest, we'll continue to grow that rapidly, recognizing that it allows for us to broaden the relationship with those clients. It also allows for us to look at how our bank is funded, how the bank entity is funded.
As we've done through this recent period of increased deposits, we'll continue to manage the balance sheet in an active way and, you know, take down wholesale funding where we can do that and replace it with lower cost funding alternatives like deposits from the retail bank or from TTS, et cetera. The two go together. As Anand has suggested, in terms of the relationship element of it, but also the funding advantage of having good momentum in deposit growth on the heels of investments that we've made and the like.
Got it. Just a follow-up to this, and then I'll let Ebrahim ask his questions. I think, you know, Jane, the deposit engine that you have in TTS and what's coming in wealth management is well appreciated by the street. I think the question really is born out of, you know, these deposits are thought of as probably more rate sensitive in a rising U.S. rate environment. You know, clearly relative to your money center peers, your U.S. deposit franchise is not in a similar scale. I think that's what the genesis of the question is coming from. Any response to that? Then I'll take myself out of the queue.
Look, I think it's important, as you heard from Anand today, to look at what it is we are in retail banking in the U.S. and what it is we are not. You know, our strategy there is to use the assets that we have to make targeted investments. Let's be clear, we are not going to be a nationwide branch-based retail bank. We're making the most of the assets we do have. We think they're valuable, both in terms of feeding into the wealth franchise, as well as a source of low-cost funding. We've got a lot of confidence behind our digital strategy, and the relationships that will grow.
I don't for one second think we're gonna be something we're not going to be in retail banking in the U.S. We're very confident with what we are, what we're going to be, and focused on maximizing that.
Thank you.
Now we'll move on to Ebrahim Poonawala from Bank of America. After that, we're gonna move to Betsy Graseck at Morgan Stanley. Ebrahim, you may proceed.
Thank you. I guess the first question, Jane, for you around you started the day talking about driving a culture of excellence, bringing in the top talent to Citi. One of the criticisms we've heard, address that for a little bit for us, is when you look through your direct reports, yes, they are new in their roles, but they've been at Citi for a long, long time, on average about 10 years. Give us your perspective on why Citi doesn't need a ton of external talent in terms of your direct reports. This is no disrespect to folks who are in that seat, but give us a perspective of why these are the right people and why Citi doesn't need that external talent to move forward.
Ebrahim, you touched on one of the very first questions when I was announced as CEO that I spent a lot of time on because I know the team around my table, and more importantly, no offense to them sitting here, the ones two, three levels down are absolutely critical for the transformation we have. We have a refresh strategy. We have a transformation to execute. I needed to make sure that I had the right team around the table and in those engine rooms. From my experience, and I've had a number of transformations, our mortgage business, private bank, Mexico over the years, you want a combination of external and internal talent.
We've brought in some really world-class external talent, both in the technology and in the business arena, as well as risk and controls from our top peers and our top technology firms as we talked about. They're bringing a fresh perspective to the place. They're also bringing in expertise in areas that we were under scaled in, such as data. They're incredibly valuable. At the same time, in my experience, you want to have the great talent and the change agents. I specifically looked for change agents to bring around to the seats that you saw as highlighting today. Individuals who have a breadth and depth of experience. Citi is a global firm.
We need people with experience across different geographies, across different businesses to help drive the silo breaking that we're doing and the delivery of the whole firm to our client base. It's the combination of the two. The point, though, one of the questions I'm hearing is around, you know, change agents. Let me give you an example. Ernesto Torres Cantú, who runs Latin America, he grew up his entire career at Banamex. I sat down in front of him, went down to Mexico and said, "Ernesto, we're going to sell the consumer franchise in Mexico, and I want you to work out how I think it's in the best interest of the bank." He blinked for 90 seconds, and then he said, "Okay, I agree.
I think it is in the right interest of the bank." He has gone about the last few months making sure that we will execute this with excellence. It's that combination. Deep down into the second and third layers, it's extraordinary the amount of talent that we've brought in. I'm excited by them, but it's the power of the combination. I believe that I have a team that is going to execute with excellence and get this job done.
That's helpful perspective. Another question, maybe this one for Anand around-
Just going back to the experience in the U.S. for online-only banks has been they've been attracting deposits by paying up. Give us a sense. You spend enough time in Asia. We've seen a lot of online neobanks come in North America and go back to Europe over the last few years. One, give us a sense of can you actually develop a high-quality relationship with a digital-first strategy in the U.S.? Is the U.S. consumer there? Because if I recall correctly, you mentioned you expect 30% of deposit growth coming from digital, and immediately you think about digital, it feels like you'll be the top rate payer to get those deposits. Would love any perspective there, Anand, in terms of what you're seeing globally, why some of these neobanks failed in the U.S., and how Citi can learn from their mistakes.
I will pass over to Anand, but I'd say that many of these online-only banks would be very envious of the customer base that we have and the assets we have, but I might be biased. Anand.
Sure. Thank you, Jane. Hi, Ebrahim. If you look at the last three years, as I said, we grew deposits 35%. 20% of the growth came from digital. When we look forward, we are saying that 20 is going to now be 30% of growth coming from digital. The way I look at digital, it's complementing our strategy around the six urban centers. We have our majority of our deposit today coming from our six urban centers. That's where we have our established network. We're complementing that nicely with our digital deposits. There are two or three things with digital. One is it gives us national access. Secondly, we have a large cards customer base. As you've seen, the $20 billion of dep...
Digital deposits, 40% of that came from our cards customer base. To Jane's point, we have 70 million card customers, so a lot of lots to work on for us internally. Third is we're building this in a plug-and-play model where we can plug and play with partners. As we're expanding, as you saw with American Airlines, we started with the credit card, we expanded to lending, now we are bringing banking. The way we look at digital is just not pure play organic, put out our online banking out there. It is basically using our assets that we have with our network, with our partners, and also our customers that we already have. That's how we look at digital from our perspective.
Sure. Thank you.
Next question is going to come from Betsy Graseck at Morgan Stanley, and after that we're going to move to John McDonald from Autonomous. Betsy, you may proceed.
All right. Thanks so much for all the detail today and the insights. It's been. You know, in some of these business lines, we've been looking for some of this kind of detail for a while, so really appreciate the effort to pull it all together for us. Jane, I'll just start off with a question for you, and it's around the goals on revenue growth. When I look at those revenue growth goals, they do look a little punchy, especially relative to what you've generated in the past few years. You know, I understand the amount of focus and investment that you're looking to deliver that with. The question I have is: How much of the revenue growth goals are a function of rates rising?
If rates don't rise, would that change how you're thinking about either the rev growth goals or the ROTCE goals? You know, the question embedded in there is: Do expenses flex with revenues to hit those ROTCE goals, or should we expect that ROTCE goals will, you know, move in line with revenues? So a little bit of color there would be helpful. Thanks.
Even if I take a big step back for one moment, one of our big goals was to be able to, after a year's worth of work on the strategy, really make sure that everyone understands the strategy that lies behind. Therefore, the drivers, the metrics we're going to be providing you, and that you're going to be holding us to account for, and then how that translates into financial outcomes. Really the question on the revenue growth is one of when, not if. That is the flexibility that frankly we've provided. I talked about the fact that we've incorporated the fact there are things we can control and there are some things we can't control. Rates is one of them. I'll pass to Mark to talk a little bit about what the rate composition is in there.
I have a high degree of conviction around our ability to reach the targets that we've laid out in the medium term, and then the ambitions that we will to drive further than that in the future. It's a question of when, not if, Betsy. Mark, do you want to talk a little bit more on the financial side?
Thank you, and good afternoon, Betsy. It's good to see you. Jane, I think you kind of teed it up very nicely. We're obviously in an abnormally low rate environment, and as we've all been looking at the forward curves, we certainly have been trying to digest those as we've constructed our plan in this multi-year forecast. What's embedded in here is, you know, 7 rate hikes, five of which are in 2022, and another two in 2023, with kind of a terminal rate, if you will, that's about 2%. As I walk through the slides, interest rates and their impact account for about 20%-25% of the revenue growth in that medium-term forecast or guidance that I've provided.
That gives you some sense for that, Betsy. The balance of that comes from the investments that we've talked about, particularly in the growth businesses, but also in the targeted share gain businesses, you know, as well as the recovery in consumer that I referenced. In terms of the other part of your question, the other thing that we tried to break down was just to give you a sense for the sizable buckets in our expense base, and I'd say there's somewhere close to 20%-25% of our expenses that are volume related, if you will.
Whether the revenue growth comes in the period that we've articulated or a bit later, to Jane's point around not if, but when, there'll obviously be a natural movement in the expense base associated with the revenue shortfall if that were to play out as a result of rates or anything else. Hopefully that gives you some sense. We've obviously sensitized this to get very comfortable both with the revenue trajectory that we have, but also the expense forecast, and importantly, the ability to get to that 11%-12%, you know, in three-five years. We feel very good about that, notwithstanding obviously a macro environment that we've got to play through.
Mark, if you could also give us some sense on that corporate other line impact on ROTCE. I know we got the segment outlook, when we put it all together, for shareholders that we have to think about that corporate other line as well. How should we be thinking about that?
There are a couple places that I referenced it in the presentation. One place I referenced it is on the capital slide where I talk about over the medium term, our intent on how we'll be managing allocated capital to the different parts of the business. There you'll see two buckets. One, the corporate other, the other legacy franchises. Both are important because, you know, arguably that's where unproductive capital is residing, at least temporarily. The way to think about that is that over time, we're going to continue to bring that down. There's some $11 billion or so associated with the divestiture businesses that we've talked about before, about $7 billion with the Asia countries, consumer countries, and another $4 billion with the Mexico consumer business.
There's a portion associated with our disallowed DTA, about $9.5 billion, call it rounding to $10 billion or so. We're, you know, given we ended the year with a higher CET1 ratio, there's some excess there as well. The way to think about it, Betsy, is that over the course of the next period of time and through to and beyond the medium term, we're going to continue to work that down through both exits as well as utilization of that disallowed DTA over that period of time.
Okay. That's helpful. Thank you. Then just lastly, the white labeling of global banking for fintechs was very interesting, and I'm wondering how big. Well, two things. One, what's the business model there for you, and how large could that become for you as a revenue growth driver?
Yeah. I'll pass that to Paco in just a moment. It is one, as you heard, that we're excited about. It's not just for fintechs in TTS, as you heard Shahmir talking about, but we're also seeing this opportunity across financial services institutions worldwide. You had Stuart referencing it, you have Paco referencing it. Paco, tell Betsy why you're so excited by this one.
Yeah, there is a general opportunity, Betsy, with financial institutions of providing, you know, banking as a service for them to deliver that to their own clients. There are areas where that is happening already. It's happening in FX, for instance, and it's happening in payments as well, in cross-border payments, as you heard from Shahmir. We already have a significant business there. We think that's just the beginning. I mean, it could happen with other markets products. It would definitely happen with Securities Services, with other parts of TTS. As we think about the strategy for our services business, financial institutions that are already a very large part of our business are a very clear opportunity for us because of this very point.
Thank you.
Now we'll move to John McDonald from Autonomous, and after that we're going to go to Steve Chubak from Wolfe. John, you may proceed.
Hi. Good afternoon, Jane.
Hey there, John.
Wanted to ask you, there's obviously some terrible things going on in the world right now.
Mm-hmm.
You all have a lot of humanitarian concerns for what's going on and the people affected. I did want to ask you financially, how you think about your exposure to Russia and Eastern Europe, on the balance sheet and then the global markets businesses, and how you'll be thinking about managing through that?
I will absolutely cover that, but let me just take a step back to what you said at the very beginning. It's been horrific watching what's going on in Ukraine. We have over 200 people on the ground, Citi family in Ukraine, who are braving through the horrors that they're facing. I could not be more proud of them because every single day through this war, they have been operating our bank and making sure that we're operating on the ground so that we're able to serve our clients there, the multinationals, and we're helping them with payroll. We're helping them make sure that the supply chains are coming through, and the humanitarian aid that so many countries are providing to Ukraine is able to get through the country despite everything.
They are quite exceptional in their drive of what they're wanting to do for their country and for the bank, and for our clients. Our primary priority, though, is their health and safety. We've been helping those that want to get across the border into Poland, giving them safe accommodation there. We've given them advances on their payroll, emergency supplies, medical availability, and as much support as we possibly can. As members of the Citi family, our hearts are absolutely with them at the moment. When we turn to Russia, I think it's helpful just a bit of context, and I'll pass it to Mark to go through a bit more detail on the exposure. We opened our doors in Russia in the 1990's when Russia opened up.
Our client base there, aside from our consumer franchise that we announced a while ago that we intend to exit, is primarily American and European, and a few Asian multinationals operating on the ground in Russia. I think similar to what you heard from Paco, our exposure in Russia is 0.3%. So that's 0.3% of our asset base is our exposure in Russia. So this is, as you can imagine, when I say that a lot of our priority is on our people, and helping try to serve our clients there is in the grand scheme of for a G20 country, this is not a huge exposure. It's one we're managing very carefully, and I'll pass to Mark to give you some more of the details about.
Well, I guess I'd start by saying, as Jane suggested, this is a very fluid situation, and one that we've been managing very closely, you know, as a management team for all the reasons that Jane mentioned. On Monday, I think it was, we put out our 10-K, and we gave some additional disclosure around our exposure in Russia. We pointed to the $5.4 billion that Jane referenced of kind of country exposure in the form of ICG and consumer loans and securities there. When you look through that, the net investment exposure's about $1 billion. Actually, a little bit less than $1 billion.
930, somewhere around that in terms of that net investment exposure in country. There are other exposures that we have to the central bank and other third-party institutions there. There are reverse repo assets that we have and, as well as, cross-border exposures from Russian entities outside of Russia. When you add all of those things up, as it's reported in the K, it gets to about a $9.8 billion number as of December 31 of last year. I said we've been working this. We've been managing that very proactively to bring that number down. We've also hedged that net investment exposure of less than $1 billion I referenced earlier against foreign currency depreciation or the prospect of that.
We've been working very closely with our risk management team to run various scenarios as to what that exposure could mean under different stress-type scenarios. We've run those numbers to ensure that we have a view on that. I'd say looking at a severe stress scenario, that number on the high end could be a little less than half of that exposure, but it could also be a lot less than that, just depending on how the situation evolves, and we'll continue to monitor it. As appropriate, we'll obviously share information accordingly.
Okay. Mark, if I could ask a follow-up for you on the outlook for 2022. Two quick items here. In terms of the markets revenues, it looks like you're expecting revenues to be down 10% in the first quarter year-over-year, but flat for the full year. Just kind of talk about what gets better throughout the year. Is it just the comps that you face, and what else might be better than that assumption? Then second on the buybacks for this year. After the first quarter, are share buybacks a maybe for this year, or is it just you're gonna do some and you're not sure how much? If you could give us a little color on that, it'd be helpful.
Sure. I'm gonna let Paco kind of touch on the markets piece. I mean, you captured it right in terms of, you know, there are components of it that are just kind of the comps year over year, but we did see, you know, activity in the first quarter that's probably worth mentioning. Paco, why don't you touch on the markets piece, and then I'll come back and touch on the capital question.
Yeah. I think the first quarter numbers are influenced by the very strong first quarter that we and the industry had last year. That drop is not necessarily surprising to us. I think over the rest of the year, we expect equities to continue to be lower than last year because it had an extraordinary year last year. We think, and we predict fixed income to be better than last year, in part associated to the you know, interest rate movements as well.
John, in terms of your question regarding capital actions through the balance of the year, we've obviously given guidance for the first quarter, both in the way of, you know, what the dividends are, but I spoke last quarter about levels that are comparable to what we saw at the end of 2021. You know, as I think about the balance of the year, there are a couple of things that come into play, some of which are certainly controllables or things you get your arms around a lot easier, like our earnings, the prospect of our earnings forecast, right? We feel very good. We've got a strong earnings-generating engine, you know, in the firm across the franchise. Feel good about that in the balance of the year.
Similarly, we can certainly talk to the utilization of the disallowed DTA, which obviously creates capacity as well. I think that then you get into things that are a little bit, you know, harder to put specificity around in terms of both timing, and to some extent, the magnitude of the impact. Think about the exits that we have, not just the ones that are announced or close to closing. We know those. Those are in the appendix of the deck. Think about the Mexico consumer business that we are working diligently to get done.
You would have heard me mention at the last earnings announcement that for our Mexico consumer franchise, there's a currency translation adjustment that's associated with that transaction depending on how it's structured and the form it takes that would result in a P&L impact at signing that gets neutralized at closing, right? The number I gave was some number less than $3 billion, roughly $2.8 billion or so of an impact. If you think about that, John, if we are on a path and we get a structured deal that's signed, that's a P&L impact that has a temporary impact on my capacity that gets solved when it gets resolved when it closes.
That's one factor that we're kind of factoring in to how we think about the planning and the prospect of the timing there. The other factor is Russia. I just mentioned that, right? A lot of unknowns around that. We're trying to dimension what stress might look like, and we have to see how sanctions and many other things evolve and what that could mean. Could mean nothing, but we have to see. We have to watch that. The third is as it relates to the stress test that we do every year. The CCAR process is underway now. You've heard from others, and probably no surprise to hear from us that as we think about it this year, the severity of the scenario is not significantly different from last year.
We've all seen kind of reserve levels come down as we've all gone through a period of releases over the past year or so. What does that mean in the way of Stress Capital Buffer and therefore impact on what we have to hold, what others have to hold? When I think about all of those factors, they are part of the capital planning that we're doing, with some being easier to get your mind and arms around, the others being unknowns. For that reason, I haven't gotten into the specificity of what we plan to do in quarters two through quarter four. We obviously have a plan that we have in place, and I'll share that kind of as it makes sense to do so.
I do want to kind of lean back on the principle that, hopefully came across as a theme through all of our presentations, which is the intent here is to not only, optimize and improve the return on the capital that we have, but to return any excess that we have to shareholders as soon as practical. That would certainly include 2022, you know, as well.
Thanks.
Thanks, everyone. We still have a queue of eight first-time questioners, so if we could keep it to a single question and a short follow-up, that would be terrific. Next question is going to be from Steve Chubak from Wolfe Research, and that'll be followed by Ken Usdin from Jefferies. Steve, you may proceed.
Thanks very much. Jane, I appreciate your comment on the Russia-Ukraine conflict, and wishing the best to your employees on the ground.
Thank you.
Wanted to start off with just a follow-up on the topic of geopolitical risk in the planned business sales. To what extent does the recent volatility in emerging markets impact pending or future business sales? Is there any risk of deal break with those that have already been signed? As we think about the modeling of the runoff segment, how should we think about stranded costs and capital once you complete the sales or wind down of those legacy franchises?
I'll pass over to Mark around some of the details around it. Overall, I don't see a lot of geopolitical risk to the sales. Obviously, the situation in Russia is very fluid. A British understatement there. It's too early to tell exactly what that means in terms of our sales process. In the other geographies, where we've got the signed deals, I think we're feeling very confident, pleased with the progress we made, both in signing but also in the progress we're making in getting those towards legal day two. I'm sitting comfortably on that respect. I'll turn to Mark. Stranded costs, capital and the legacy franchises are things both he and I have had a lot of experience on.
Both in holdings for him in the old days, and then for myself in LatAm when we've been selling pieces. We know how to take stranded cost out, and we also know how to simplify management structures afterwards. Part of that simpler, modern, more efficient organization we talk to is using the divestitures to make sure that we can simplify the organization and not only get stranded costs reduced, but also get additional efficiencies from a simpler structure. Mr. Mason, any greater words of wisdom, sir?
Let's see. Thank you, Steven, and good afternoon. I guess I'd say a couple things. First, on the divestitures and the impact of the capital that gets freed up, we put a schedule in the back of my deck that gives you a sense for the timing we expect for some of these transactions to close. As Jane mentioned, those are on track, knock wood, and we feel very good about that. As that capital gets freed up, frankly, it's got to get factored into the conversation or the comments that I just made in response to John's question. Obviously we have all of those factors to consider.
We've got to obviously build to a higher CET1 ratio at the end of this year because of the pending G-SIB surcharge. Again, all with an eye towards over time being able to manage back down to a what we think is the more prudent level of capital in terms of CET1, and therefore returning excess that we don't need to invest in the franchise to shareholders. Over time, that is, that remains the objective as it relates to anything that gets freed up from the divestitures.
Yeah-
In terms of spending.
Yeah, I was gonna.
In terms of-
Go ahead, Mark.
Sorry, did you want to say something, Jane?
No, just going in. Absolute imperative for us is making sure that we can return excess capital to our shareholders. It's one of the major motivations we have here.
Absolutely. In terms of the stranded cost, you know, as Jane mentions, we've got a lot of experience at this. When we look at the stranded costs associated with this, with these divestitures, you know, I'd start with kind of the total cost base, which is probably $6.8 billion, rounded to $7 billion. Our prior experience would suggest that 20%-30% of that ends up being stranded if you do nothing. Jane and I are very focused, along with the rest of the management team, of driving out that 20%-30% out of the organization.
We think that, you know, as we look at the strategy that Jane had, and the team is taking you through, that's what actually gives us some confidence and conviction that we can do that. Because having refreshed our strategy, reorganized the firm, that's gonna give us opportunities to simplify, to make the place flatter and leaner. I see coming out of that medium-term window, a real opportunity to get the balance of that out of the organization.
Well, thank you both for that color. Just for a quick follow-up on the IB and trading outlook. Mark, in your presentation you included medium-term revenue growth targets. It was mid-single digit growth in markets, low singles in IB. Following, using your words, unprecedented levels of activity in 2021, how are you handicapping normalization headwinds, or said differently, what are you assuming for the growth in the IB and trading fee pools versus that 2021 baseline as part of those medium-term growth goals?
I'm not sure I understood your question, Steven. I talked about in my presentation the outlook for revenue growth for each of those parts of the business, right? For markets, mid-single digits in that medium term, that is in that three-five year window. For banking, low single digits. That's on the heels of seeing normalization in the near term, call it 2022, you know, perhaps quarter 2023. Seeing the rebound in that medium-term window from those levels based on a couple of things. One, the investments that we're making in parts of the banking franchise. You've heard about some of the key sectors in investment banking that we want to continue to build out our talent in, that are converging, et cetera, et cetera.
As well as, you know, as Paco spent a lot of time talking about how we continue to optimize and increase the revenue that we have associated with RWA in parts of the markets business, which will result in, I think, both returns, but also upside in revenue. Then the final piece that I'd mention are the linkages. A big part of what we talk about in our strategy here is how we're able to take advantage of the breadth of our offering with our client base. The combination of those things is how I think about the upside from normalization, you know, in markets and in banking, given the robust client activity we've seen recently. Paco, anything you'd want to add to that?
Yes. If you look at how we have thought about our plan, in there we have assumed a very significant correction in banking and in equities in 2022, which, you know, seems to be happening, as we speak. You know, it's the logical follow-up from, you know, extraordinary years. Not so much in fixed income. In fixed income, that correction happened in 2021, in fact, versus, you know, extraordinary 2020. The combination of markets is more balanced, and we expect a correction in banking. We see that after that correction, growth comes back. That's what's consistent with the numbers that you have seen in the plan.
Great color. Thanks so much for taking my questions.
Next, person is gonna be Ken Usdin from Jefferies. That's gonna be followed by Vivek Juneja from JP Morgan. Ken, please proceed.
Great. Thanks. Hi, Jane and Mark. Appreciate the time today and all the color. You know, just a question back on the ROTCE targets. When you think about 8.9% Mark said ex-reserve release this year, we know that there's a couple of high ROE businesses going away and some negative operating leverage to deal with in the interim. I'm just trying to understand, Jane, you said you're very confident in getting inside that 11%-12% window in three-five years. You know, what's the trade-offs of perhaps going a little lower and a little sooner in terms of giving people a path to something in between to kind of knock down a
... knock down a wall a little earlier, as opposed to something that could take up to five years to get, you know, inside the range as you said.
As we talked about, we'll give you guidance on an annual basis. The world is quite an uncertain place at the moment, and we think that is prudent and wise, and we've been very clear. We want to make sure that we have a credible plan, that we're able to give you progress and demonstrate that. I think most importantly, we're giving you the KPIs to show you if the strategy is working and what's not. The same KPIs I'm going to be managing the businesses and then my leadership team with to make sure that we're delivering the value along the way. It's been very important. The strategy drives the financial outcomes. Look, as Mark talked about and I've talked about, we know that we need to earn the credibility.
The proof will be in the pudding, and we'll give you the markers along the way and show you the progress. I am very convinced, as you can tell, we will deliver the medium-term targets. We have high conviction that in the longer term that we'll be delivering higher than that. I've heard everyone loud and clear. We're focused on delivering those medium-term targets to you and making progress and building our credibility along the way. Proof's in the pudding. We appreciate that, Ken.
Yeah. A follow-up just for Mark. Mark, you said normalization of cost of credit over the near term getting to a 1% over in that three-five year window. Just can you help us understand, you said normalization, I think for this year as well. What's happening with credit? What do you see starting to move, if anything? If you could just juxtapose, you know, commercial versus consumer on your way to that longer term 1%. Thank you.
Yeah, sure. I'd say a couple of things and we should probably put, you know, some of the broader macro environmental things aside that Jane spoke to in terms of Russia and the like, you know, in the comments here, because again, that situation is moving in real time and as we get more color on that, we'll factor that in. I think, Ken, there are a couple of things to think about here. I think in many ways, they're largely on the heels of positive news in the way of a recovery. We aren't seeing, you know, any negative trends, if you will, as it relates to our consumer portfolio, our cards portfolio, or on the corporate side, as it relates to credits and exposures that we have there.
The risk appetite and framework that we've had in place for a number of years now has held up nicely through this recent crisis and seems to be you know managing towards kind of the soft landing that we would have all you know hoped for there when you look at that, and you've seen that through reserve releases that have played out. Most of what I'm referencing when I talk about that normalization really has to do with you know the growth that we expect in our loan portfolio both on the consumer you know and the corporate side. As we start to pick up momentum in terms of loan volumes, we'll build you know cost of credit associated with that.
That will obviously build into the reserve levels. I think the second component to it is just as on the consumer side in particular, as we see payment rates start to normalize and, you know, existing card customers start to build balances and some of the liquidity, the excess liquidity that's been out in the market start to get utilized, we would expect kind of normal net credit losses to play out on the consumer side of the house in our cards portfolio. You know, that's to the tune of 2.5%-3% in terms of NCLs that we would expect in the U.S. cards business versus levels that we've seen in the past.
Those are the components of the normalization that I'm referencing.
Next question for Vivek. Vivek Juneja from JPMorgan, that'll be followed by Chris Kotowski from Oppenheimer.
For Anand, what do you expect to do differently in deposits this time? You've had a top three card customer base for decades. That's not new. You said 40% of your deposits are from card customers. Other than price, what is going to be different this time?
Yeah, Anand, in the interest of time, I'll save a preamble.
Thank you. Thank you, Jane. Hi, Vivek. What we've done in the last three years, as I'd explained, we've been building out our digital capabilities. That's basically the ability to open retail accounts and then get digital deposits, one thing. More importantly, what we like, what we are doing right now and what we like to do is to build a relationship with the customer. We started off by building the digital deposits, and that sort of picked up $20 billion over the last three years. We're now adding to that the digital lending pieces that we just talked about on the lending side. Jim talked about the Citi Self Invest, which is the wealth piece. All of these are digitally coming together, and that's what we want to build this time around.
We have the customer base. We, and like I said, we want to grow digital deposits, but we want to grow it responsibly, and we want to make sure it makes economic sense. Then if you start building a value proposition that deepens customer across products, and that's where you're going to get the, bigger play. That's how we are thinking about digital, just not a pure deposit play only.
Thank you.
Next question, Chris Kotowski from Oppenheimer. After that'll be Gerard Cassidy from RBC. Chris, you may proceed.
Yeah. Thank you. Just a quick point of clarification from Mark. You said that under stress, your loss exposure in Russia could be roughly half that exposure.
Were you referring to the $930 million country exposure or to the $9.8 billion gross exposure?
To be clear, that was a severe stress scenario, and I was referring to the higher number under severe stress, less than half.
Okay.
Yeah, that's the absolute worst case.
Yeah.
Correct. Yep.
Okay.
I think it's more likely to be, you know, a lot less than that.
Okay. My primary question was as a veteran of the 2017 investor day where you set out a ROTCE target of 10% by 2020. You've kind of made that and now, you know, 11%-12% a couple years from now. It's obviously a long time. It just struck me as you were talking, you know, that the issue with Citi doesn't seem to be fragility anymore. You know, it's just that your returns are low, and you cited numbers like 83% of your consumer customers are prime, and 82% of your corporate is investment grade, that you're under-penetrated in leveraged finance and that you under-penetrated in...
You know, it seems to me like your wholesale business are in a lot of kind of less risky, less return businesses, and you've taken the strategic approach that you wanna grow the kind of higher ROE businesses. I'm curious, is there a way to kind of throttle back on some of these lower return businesses too, though? You know, obviously they're very balance sheet intensive and, you know, they seem like low risk, low return assets to keep on a balance sheet. Is that why we kind of have this somewhat uninspiring 11%-12%, you know, intermediate term goal?
In what you've heard today is, we talked about our mix, that we started looking at a somewhat disadvantaged mix at the beginning of the day, Chris, and talking about what do we do about that from an organic perspective. The first piece is, where are the areas that we are looking to grow in, where we feel we've got a strong competitive position and opportunity to grow, which are the higher returning parts of the business in TTS, wealth, commercial bank, as example. Banking is obviously also another area that we see the potential for high return growth over time in.
For the other businesses that we talked about, which are scaled, as you heard from Paco and you heard from Anand, it's making sure that we're pivoting to realize synergies across the franchise. We believe that there are parts of the business we can focus more on the higher returning components of the wallet. We're going to be extremely disciplined around capital allocation. You know, one example of that is exiting the consumer franchises in Asia that were lower return. Other examples of that is what Paco is doing with our great team of Kerry and Andy in markets in making sure that we're realizing the synergies across the business and in terms of pivoting the capital allocation to the higher return parts of the wallet there.
This is gonna take time, to achieve this as we're being very transparent around, but I think we've got a very clear path to realizing, far more potential here, and we're just taking this step by step. How do we get to the medium-term ROTCE targets, and then how do we move to something with higher ambition? We're doing this one step at a time and making sure that we deliver on what we're saying we're going to do.
Thank you.
The final question of the day is gonna go to Gerard Cassidy at RBC. Gerard.
Oh, perfect. We left the best till last. What can we say?
Well, you're very kind to say that. Thank you. Mark showed a very interesting table which you guys put together about the underperformance that Citi has had from 2017 through 2021. We also heard from your colleagues today, and Mark and you both emphasized that how interconnected your five business groups will be going forward. Jane, share with us how are you. Since your numbers from the past suggest maybe it hasn't worked that well, but how do you get this interconnection or the collaboration between the different groups to work? How do you incentivize them? How are you going to instill in them the importance of this collaboration to drive your numbers that you've set out for us for the next 3-5 years?
Gerard, it's such a great question, because it also gets to the transformation, the cultural change that is required to unleash the synergies. When we started doing the strategy refresh work, one of the things we said the bank has to be simpler, and we have to be focused on fewer businesses that do connect well together. I think a focus is wonderful in that it does make it easier to make sure that these different dimensions can be delivered. Oh, just one second while I take some tea. My husband would say I've been talking too much. In terms of how do we get this to work? Some of it's in wealth.
We've brought them all together into a single business to be able to deliver and then ensure the connectivity occurs. Another is gonna be through performance management, the metrics we laid out. I'm gonna be measuring Jim on what's he doing in terms of getting Tasnim the referrals from the commercial bank to the private bank and to the wealth franchise. We're gonna be looking at what's happening from the elevator from the commercial bank up to the corporate bank, how well is that doing. We're gonna be measuring and managing what are we doing to get the linkages between banking to capital markets by originating more of the strategic solution financing plays, not just M&A and equities and DCM.
It will be through a combination of incentives, performance management, it's a culture change that we're driving within the bank, and it's also by the operating reviews. We have now that we've turned from strategy to execution, we're very focused on the different operational, measurement, management reviews, what's working, what's not working, you know, this is one of the ones that's front and center. It's the one I'm very excited about, and as you see it working, you'll know that Citi is changing. Well, I think that was the last question. Thank you very much for your thoughtful questions. I know we packed a lot in today, and I want to thank you for being so engaged along the way here. To me, today was about providing clarity.
We wanted you to clearly understand our vision, understand our strategy, and how we built it. We wanted you to clearly understand how we're tackling what's held us back in the past in terms of our operations, our risk and controls, and our culture. We wanted you to clearly understand our targets and how we will achieve them. At the same time, we also wanted you to see the clarity and the conviction our entire management team has on our strategy, on the value of our network, and on how our five interconnected businesses will deliver for our shareholders. I've been at Citi for 17 years. I love this firm. I'm passionate about it, and so is everyone you heard from today. You probably saw that for yourselves.
I think you also saw something else, our determination to get the job done so we can significantly increase value for our shareholders for the long term. We know we have something to prove, and we welcome the opportunity to do it. We know it won't be easy. We know it will take time. I'm holding this team accountable, and I know you're holding me accountable. I am confident we are on the right path, and I'm looking forward to showing the progress that we're gonna make along the way. Thank you again, and enjoy the rest of your day. Thank you.