All right, so thank you so much for joining us this morning. I have to read a disclosure first. For important disclosures, please see the Morgan Stanley Research Disclosure website at morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. Taking photographs and the use of recording devices is also not allowed. This is meant to—if you have any questions, please reach out to your Morgan Stanley sales representative. Okay, thank you so much. With that out of the way, we are delighted to have with us this morning Viz Raghavan. Thank you so much, Viz, for joining us this morning.
Betsy, thanks for having us, and thanks for hosting us all here. A pleasure to be here. Morning, everyone.
For those of you who may not know Viz, Viz joined Citigroup last year as Head of Banking, responsible for investment banking, corporate banking, and commercial banking. He is also Executive Vice Chair, where Viz helps shape and drive firm-wide strategy. Viz, you are overseeing what I would call a renaissance in Citi's investment banking businesses with share gains in several businesses. I first want to dig into your management style before turning to the numbers. First off, what did you expect when you took this job? What did you see, and how did that compare with what you expected?
I've always admired Citi from the other side. I mean, they've been formidable competitors. You've come head-to-head with them on bake-offs and client situations. I've seen some amazing deals happen, incredible idea generation, and the like. I've always admired Citi from the other side. When I kind of look back on my own journey and you look at the banking landscape, I felt Citi was kind of going through what every bank had been through in its kind of evolution: consent orders, remediation, transformation, et cetera. Every bank has had its own version of it. In almost every instance, that institution has come out stronger. Jane's leadership has been remarkable. The way the progress the bank has made in kind of getting around a lot of the kind of remediation actions, the transformation agenda has been truly, truly fantastic.
What is also remarkable is the way the leadership team has set up the building blocks for success. You see a kind of a compartment of progress that is really getting the house fixed and stronger. At the same time, what Jane has mandated is the businesses need to really get going. It's not kind of sequential. While we are doing this, markets, banking, wealth, get going. The strategy kind of really knits together. One of the key attractiveness of doing this has really been the kind of just the scale of the bank. The geographical reach has been incredible. It's really been validated since I joined. It's complete, and it's global.
Okay. One of the reasons I want to dig into this is because you do have some very interesting share gains, in particular in M&A, for many of the last several quarters. 2024 was a really strong year, and 1Q 2025 was strong. I'm sitting here thinking, what happened? What did you do differently? Is this a function of bankers being evaluated differently, paid differently? Is it a function of just hiring a lot more people? What's driving this share gain?
Hiring a lot of people, I mean, we're just getting started in terms of talent investment, et cetera. Let me come back to your point. If you look at when I joined, the market share before 2024 was around 4%. We ended up at 4.5% at the end of last year. We had around 5.3% in the quarter gone. The gains last year were really driven by high-grade bond issuance. The whole investment banking market benefited from this in the run-up to elections. You saw a lot of corporates pre-fund, et cetera. There was a torrent of high-grade issuance, some acquisition financing, which was kind of brought forward. High-grade typically tends to be what we call a bit more flow. It has always been Citi's strength. It is linked to balance sheet. It's linked to capital that you deploy with clients.
Effectively, you have high-grade bond issuance as kind of a byproduct of that. Plus, in this instance, clearly, it was a lot of, in the given elections, et cetera, folks wanted to kind of take money and access the market. We were a beneficiary of that. That played entirely to what I always thought was Citigroup's kind of really strong kind of competency. The bit that Citigroup kind of missed out on historically, and there is some math to it, which I'll come to later on, was since the financial crisis, that entire financial sponsor boom and the leveraged finance boom, Citigroup did not partake in as strongly as some of the other banks did. Financial sponsors, for instance, grew AUM from, I do not know, around $2 trillion to around $12-$13 trillion today. During that process, they bought, sold, bought, sold, financed, refinanced.
That entire boom was incredibly lucrative for the banking industry that Citi did not play in, in part risk appetite, because the crisis on the back of the last leveraged finance kind of boom was not particularly happy landing for the whole street. Also, clearly, I think from a risk appetite point of view, there was a general kind of retrenchment. What we did was, if you look at the AUM of this community, they have $2.7 trillion of firepower waiting to be deployed. If you look at any year of the overall investment banking, it is $80 billion of a fee pool, plus or minus 10%. That is kind of, except for 2021, that is kind of been the steady state. Sponsors, Lyfin, et cetera, account for between a quarter to a third of the fee pool.
If you look at Citi's rankings, they rank, I don't know, top five in investment banking fees. If you look at Citi's rankings historically in sponsors and Lyfin, it's 9 or 10. In other words, if you're top five while not even addressing a quarter to a third of the fee pool, it just points to how potent that corporate, the core franchise is. All you have to do is, if you modulate and you just become top five in the sponsor Lyfin community, there's a mathematical inevitability where your overall ranking has to be top three. By doing what you're doing, continue to keep doing that well and step up in this kind of the rest of the bucket. That's kind of been proven, because if you look at this quarter, KKR made two acquisitions.
We advised Silver Lake and financed them on the Altera purchase. We advised Boeing on the sale of Jeppesen that Thoma Bravo bought. We advised Boeing there. Then through the Apollo JV, we financed, and Blackstone came along and financed Thoma Bravo. Suddenly, that pivot to M&A, sponsors, Lyfin, and that, to me, has been really reassuring. I thought that would take longer, but that muscle memory is there, and we were able to do that.
While we're on the private credit discussion, can you help us understand how you're set up for that industry group, if there's anything else besides that? In addition, can you give us some more color on your partnership with Apollo and the opportunity set that you see there?
The first point I'd make is private credit is mainstream. It is no longer kind of an exotic kind of by the by. If you have kind of pillars in a capital stack all the way from senior down the debt spectrum, and then equity, private credit is a very kind of a key pillar now. When we are looking at a capital structure, effectively, that is part of the overall offering. The key point, if you look at most of last year, there was simply no arbitrage between public markets and private credit markets. Both markets were super competitive. Both markets were looking for opportunities to invest. There were not that many. As a result, there was abundant liquidity in public debt or in private credit. That's kind of still true. What you will see is that arbitrage will come back in.
That arbitrage really comes on the back of covenants. One is kind of buy to distribute and maybe hold a bit as opposed to buy to hold, maybe till maturity, mark to market, et cetera, cover lights. Different nuances that make each attractive. The key kind of point here is the private credit market does not have a liquidity problem in that there is a wall of money waiting to be deployed. For banks to commit scarce RWA, ring-fence that to create further pools of liquidity when the market is not suffering from a liquidity problem, it is really a supply problem. Everyone kind of loves to kind of showcase, "I've got X billion. You've got Y billion," to kind of say, "I've got that firepower or dry powder." The dry powder, there's an abundance of that.
What the market lacks is supply, which was the reason Apollo wanted to team up with us, because they wanted to partake in the origination, in providing that supply for that wall of liquidity. For us, what it does is you do not have to commit RWA. You do not have to ring-fence equity, et cetera. If something is indeed you like it so much, there is nothing preventing Citi from owning it in our trading books or credit books or whatever it is. It was really a very symbiotic partnership where you could lean on this $25 billion of firepower. You have already worked with Apollo really well historically. We also can bring others along. In the Jeppesen instance that I talked about, the asset Boeing sold, it was Blackstone and Apollo that came together to provide the financing.
In short, it's a key part of the capital stack. It's here to stay. You're going to see more private-public kind of get together. What you will see is a real kind of drive where companies will choose. This will go beyond sponsors, et cetera, to even corporates that may go down that route.
Coming back to the talent that you mentioned, you're still acquiring. I wanted to understand, are there any other areas globally or product-wise that you're looking to build out further?
First of all, I think the bench is remarkable. In terms of the talent at Citi, very tenured. I mean, in all these Lyfin deals I described, for instance, some of the team go back to the Salomon days. They've seen multiple cycles. They have bridged, syndicated, underwrote, distributed, multiple, multiple transactions. It was just remarkable. If you look, four of those transactions were post-liberation day. Not exactly conducive markets, a lot of volatility. We managed to kind of dissect it and underwrite it and distribute it incredibly well. A lot of pedigree and talent within the system. There are pockets where we have wide spaces where we will continue to build and invest in. In terms of the priorities, I think tech healthcare are here to stay.
I think in between industrials, technology, and healthcare, it's close to between 50%-60% of the fee pool is in those sectors. When I say industrials, even industrials are adjacency. In other words, an industrial company wants to buy in tech or in software or the like. Those are key focus areas. We'll continue to invest in the capital markets, Lyfin businesses, and really kind of really add more bench strength and capability. Likewise, geographically, U.K., Germany are kind of key. The U.K. is a quarter of the European or the EMEA market. Middle East is really getting a lot of traction. That's been historically a super strong source of strength for Citi. There's a lot of tenor and goodwill. Clearly, China is going to prevail and stay relevant in whatever form.
Japan is really getting reignited now as corporate Japan looks to focus. Streamlined. I think Japan will be a key part of the IV wallet. India is a net beneficiary of all of the stuff that is going on. Just one other point I would highlight is the major market. The Citi commercial bank is really, really good. Clearly, our investments are now going to be mainly North America focused. The idea of building the commercial bank to greater strength here and marrying that and partnering more closely with the mid-market kind of investment banking franchise is going to be incredibly busy. It is going to be incredibly fruitful.
Also because the sponsors love to play in that segment of the market, because the $2.7 trillion of firepower I talked about, because that's the $1.25 billion deal size is perfect for that.
It's been a volatile year, obviously. Turning to the environment, if we could, just having had the tariff scare and then the tariff pullback. Where are your clients now? What are you seeing today? What kind of conversations are you having with your corporate clients on opportunities for growth and execution?
Look, there is, I was stating the obvious. There is a lot of uncertainty out there. Folks, through our corporate bank, which is probably the best corporate bank out there, we get incredible real-time intelligence on the mood in boardrooms globally, what clients, how clients are looking at tariffs, their supply chains, and the like. There is a lot of anxiety. The sense we get is at 10%, which almost feels like a floor or a baseline tariff between 10%-20%. Folks are thinking, can I absorb this? How do I absorb this? Basically put it down to kind of my cost of goods sold. Anything higher than that, the question is, how do I rejig my supply chains and the like? All of this really plays into Citi's geographical reach, footprint, et cetera, because this is talking about, you are talking FX hedges.
You're talking about trade finance. You're talking supply chain. You're talking about how do I make sure that I'm not putting all my eggs in one basket and I'm kind of rejigging, redistributing my business model. And a lot of advice in terms of what all of this means for my global footprint and my global network. Point one, anxiety and bracing oneself for further uncertainty. To give you an example, what investment banking likes is clarity. Either it's really bad or really good. Whatever it is, just give us the news. It is that middle area of not knowing that really freezes market activity. Give you an example. In April, in debt plus equity financing, there was about $1.6 billion of fees. The run rate in debt and equity financing is around $3.8 billion a month. That lack of, so April, just everyone froze.
Everything was on pause, hold. We had cross-border deals. The board had approved. The night before, the board goes, we do not have to do anything. We do not have to do it now. Let's pause. Let's revisit. That freezing is what worries us. On the products, M&A continues to be super active. There is a lot of dialogue, a lot of engagement. I go back to the sponsor firepower because they are a big driver of that too, in addition to corporate M&A. In corporate M&A, what really pleases me about Citi is just the quality of the deal flow. If you take last year, the largest M&A deal was Mars buying Kellanova. We advised and financed Mars. This year is Charter-Cox. Citi and Charter-Cox. We talked about Boeing-Jeppesen. We talked about Silver Lake-Altera.
CD&R buying Sanofi's assets. Just the quality of these are the best of the best deals that are happening in the market. It is really reassuring that Citi is featuring in all of that. Just two final points. The financing market, the debt market is going to be more of a function of how the M&A market manifests itself, because there is going to be little by way of just pure flow, but more by way of acquisition financing and the takeout, even though there is a wall of maturities waiting for redemption from the 2021 financing boom. That is kind of more 2026, 2027. In equities, the IPO market, the IPOs that are getting done, and we have seen a few, have been ones where there is less, if I can use the word, less of a cost of goods sold?
In other words, to the extent you have any kind of geography, tariff, supply chain, cost of goods sold model, the question is, how do you, with clarity and certainty, put out a three-year forecast on this is how I'm going to do, so give me this valuation? What you're seeing is deals like in tech, in digital assets, et cetera, which are really kind of, we had some recent deals that have done really, really well. Generally, the minute you put in a, so that IPO market is kind of a bit stagnant to the extent that there is a manufacturing or a supply chain aspect to it, which means what happens with those assets, some of them are sponsor held, is do they go in an M&A route? Do they go P2P? Does a strategic come and buy them?
That will once again feed back to the M&A cost.
I'm hearing there's a little bit of unlock going on relative to where you were in April. Is that fair?
It is. I think April was quite, you saw the stats. I think you're seeing a bit more of, clearly, valuations are back at pre-liberation day kind of levels. Macro, we don't have time to go through it there. Then you see the equity market, credit market kind of in a bit of a disconnect, et cetera. In terms of volumes, both in primary and secondary, I think it's healthy now.
Can you give us a sense as to how the quarter has been trending so far to Q2 2025? Is pretty close to done. How has that been for banking and trading?
Let me start with banking. I laid out the context. Clearly, M&A is the catalyst and the wild card. I think debt and equity slower. Overall in banking, year on year, we expect to be up mid-single digits. If you take markets, the activity both across the FI and the corporate space has been strong. Also, FICC and equities have been strong. Year on year in markets, we are expecting to be up in the mid to high single digits. Clearly, we are still early in June. There are a few weeks still left to go. On expenses, clearly, Mark guided last quarter. As he mentioned, this quarter, expenses are likely to tick up around $200 million for this quarter, quarter on quarter. Overall, full year expenses will be, we expect, to be in line with guidance.
Finally, on cost of credit, once again, given the macro environment, et cetera, cost of credit compared to last quarter, we expect to be up a few hundred million dollars. Once again, this is reserves. Once again, on cost of credit, a lot of the work is currently still being done. We still have a few more weeks to go this quarter. On the credit overall, I'm incredibly reassured on the quality of the credit book. If you take corporate exposures, over 80% or 80% or thereabouts of our corporate exposures are high grade. If you take our international exposure, 90% or thereabouts is high grade, or it is exposure to subsidiaries of multinational corporations. A lot of comfort. As you know, our card book skews prime.
Overall, a lot of kind of comfort on the quality of the exposure of the credit book.
OK. Just putting it together one more time, if you don't mind, for folks who might have missed that. Your banking year on year.
Up mid-single digits. Markets year on year, up mid to high single digits. $200 million up quarter on quarter in expenses, but expect to be in line with full year guidance for expenses.
That's for the whole company.
For the company.
Right.
You have cost of credit is a few hundred million dollars up on last quarter in reserves. This is just reserves.
Right. Provisions is up Q on Q due to reserve build.
Correct.
OK. While we're on credit, could I just ask your opinion on the lending to other lenders, so also known as non-depository financial institution lending? We get a lot of questions from investors on how should we think about the credit cost associated with non-depository financial institution loans?
I think you have to look at, as with every loan, you have to look at it in the context of the firm's cost of capital, the excess return that capital generates, and then the opportunity cost of deploying that capital. This is something which we have, when one of the questions you asked earlier was, what metrics have you put in that are different? NBFIs are very much, whether it's a corporate NBFI or whatever, the overriding mindset, and this is something which internally is also a cultural shift, is if I take, if you are a banker and you're making $30 million and your fee pool is $100 million.
What's the name of that banker?
No. If you're making a revenue of, no, I'm not making comp on $30 million. I meant revenue of.
OK. Thank you for clarifying.
If you're a banker that's making $30 million revenue with a client and the client is a $100 million fee pool, then I bow to you. If you're a banker that makes $30 million and the fee pool is $1 billion, then you're leaving a lot of money on the table. In both instances, you may meet your bogey or your hurdle or whatever, 15%, whatever the number is, and basically justify that credit that you're extending, whether it's a corporate or a financial institution, NBFI, any client of the firm. I think the discipline that we are really now embedding in the organization is it is not just absolute. You cannot look at 30 in a vacuum. It is 30 in the context of the entirety of the opportunity.
The entirety of the opportunity is linked to what is that fee pool that the client is and the street is partaking in. The second very important thing, that ties back to your question, NBFI or otherwise, is when you look at that $30 million, a banker that generates $30 million of revenue and has a $2 billion lending outstanding to a company, that $30 million is not the same as a banker who creates $30 million of revenue with a client with no capital outstanding to the company. In other words, that, and I think the street and a lot of banks sometimes just have a revenue focus. The pivot has got to be revenue less cost of that revenue, which is really a bottom line ROTC E focus.
That is something culturally we are really, really driving our guys to, is what is the bottom line so that the marginal opportunity cost of every dime or dollar of capital you deploy is perfected to the entirety of the fee pool. That is when you have to make capital allocation decisions to see, OK, where is the best excess return for that dollar of capital you deploy? That is a big focus right now.
Viz, thanks for bringing up ROTC E, because that brings me to my next question. As I think we all know around the room here, Citigroup has a goal for ROTC E, driving that up to 10%-11%, I believe, right, in the next year or so, a couple of years, in the medium term. I'd be interested in understanding where the drivers are for you in your business to help contribute to that, because I think the ROTC E in your business was around 7% in 2024. I know Mark said, hey, this should get to a bit under 15. That's a doubling. How do you do that? What's the plans, goals, time frame?
Look, I think all of the above in terms of what we've discussed so far. Let me kind of quickly, a couple of key points there. One.
We have seven minutes. You don't have to beat the clock.
OK. A couple of points. It is the numerator and the denominator. Let's talk about the numerator first. One is earnings momentum driving revenue growth. Basically, this is really going to come through share gains in investment banking. There is a portion of that which is the inevitability piece I talked about. We are top five globally. You are 9, 10 in pockets, which is sponsors, LEFS, FINN. We have to grow LEFSIN responsibly, because this is typically sub-investment grade, et cetera. We will grow that. If we even get back to a top five landing with that grouping and we preserve and do better with our core corporate franchise, there is mathematically an inevitability where we should aspire to be top three. One. I think the second point is in pockets, which are going to be very defining going forward.
Sectors I talked about, tech, health care, industrials, which is a core strength of Citi, and then a whole bunch of others where Citi is very, very credible. We'll keep investing and growing there. Geographically, North America is a key, key market. Let me give you an example in corporate banking, for instance. Citi's geographical depth and spread in terms of servicing clients is incredible. We are in remote locations. We are in countries because multinationals, American multinationals, European multinationals want us there. We are servicing their needs there. Typically, these locations are more difficult to navigate. There's KYC, AML, and a whole bunch of other costs, et cetera. The reason we are there is because our clients want us to be there. What we cannot have is clients giving us business in those markets, and we accept that as a reward.
The reward is the easy, juicy G7 markets, dollars in the U.S., euros in Europe. What you cannot have is we are sitting there servicing their needs because they want us there in these far-flung locations. Then the easiest stuff goes elsewhere. I think we need to bring together the opportunity, and this is a big focus for us, is that global network inbound into the easier, what I would call the easier markets, per se, in corporate banking.
This brings up a question a lot of people are asking today in our multipolar world as we shift towards this, or as we're in it now. How are you dealing with customers who might be leaning to an institution that's headquartered locally? Are you finding any of that dynamic entering the conversation?
Absolutely. This is a huge strength for Citi, because Citi is global. In a lot of these countries, it is centuries old. It is kind of local local, embedded in the fabric of these countries and the corporations within these countries. What you are seeing now is that know-how, as you reroute supply chains, as you diversify, as you are rejigging your thinking, that know-how is incredibly valuable. That leads to, before, if it was unipolar flows, maybe dollar alone, you are now seeing cross-currency multipolar flows in currency, whether it is in hedging, whether it is in swaps, whether it is custody of assets. All of this really plays to Citi's strength, because it really knows these markets.
Our value added in terms of educating clients, and you've seen this already, just in understanding what there is just in terms of clarity, what clients are seeking around leaning on each other, wanting to find out more, they're relying on the Citi intelligence infrastructure to really get a handle on what are others doing. How easy is it for me to reroute this into India? Citi is one of the leading banks in India. You say, hang on a second, this is what we can do for you. Those discussions are, exactly to your question, before they were maybe unipolar, those are multipolar. Not everyone can play those other kind of adjacencies. That's a huge strength. Just going back to your question again on how are we going to turbocharge returns, because I've got to come to the denominator too.
The other point clearly is really on the commercial bank, the middle market, once again focusing to NAM is going to be a key piece. In all of this, this is really ownership, accountability, getting a mindset for excellence, and really getting the muscle memory back of winning again and again and again. In the denominator, clearly, there will be a transformation dividend. There's good progress being made there. I think a lot of that.
A transformation dividend.
Yeah, because the firm will come out stronger on the back of that. Already you're seeing the business lines are super joined up. There is a very tight, high-quality leadership team that Jane has put around with very clear visibility, lines of responsibility. There is nowhere to hide. The key is the expenses that are being, when I say that, when I talk about transformation dividend, a lot of those expenses will gradually kind of tail off as we remediate and deliver. Also on capital, we are optimizing. We are really looking at excess return, how much extra return that capital is getting. Clearly, as we grow, we will use more, but we will also return more on the capital we deploy. It's really work on both sides.
One is the numerator in terms of revenue and earnings momentum, and then clearly optimizing capital in the denominator.
OK, excellent. Thank you so much, Viz, for joining us this morning.
Thank you.