All right, everybody, good afternoon. You know, our final but, you know, last but certainly not least, we have Citigroup, and with us today is their Head of Services, Shahmir Khaliq. Welcome.
Thank you. Thank you for being here.
Thanks for joining us.
Thank you.
for the cocktail portion of the day. So just to start, you were on the stage three years ago, and two years ago, you and your team gave us a very in-depth view of the Services business. You know, so for the investors that aren't as familiar with you, can you give us a run-through of how long you've been the head of Services and where your focus has been since your previous Investor Day?
Sure. Firstly, Erika, thank you so much for being here. I think this is, I think, my second or third year that, the second time I've been here in Florida, but I think it's been about two or three years since I came to this conference last time, and a lot has changed. And as you mentioned-
Yeah
... we had our Investor Day back in the summer of 2024. So just very quickly about myself. I've been Head of Services since 2023, when Jane announced some of those organizational changes. And then, before that, I was running our Treasury and Trade Solutions business, which is part of the Services construct. And if you step back and think about what Services is, for the ones that may not be as aware, it's basically a combination of our old, what we call TTS business, Treasury and Trade Solutions business, which is payments, liquidity, and trade services, and then the Securities Services combination, which is Investor Services and Issuer Services.
So I was running the TTS business, and prior to that, I ran Ops and Technology for TTS for about a year, and then before that, I ran our Direct Custody and Clearing business. And if you, if I age myself another 10 years or so, I was running the Investor Services business for North America. So for the last 10, 12 years, I've been in the, in the Services business, running some of the market-leading businesses within the services construct and helping drive the strategy. And so the way I would think about it is we had our 2022 Investor Day, we had our 2024 Investor Day, and that's really what we've been focused on since then.
Really focusing on forward thinking, thinking about innovation and driving the agenda, but really with one overarching agenda in mind, which is Services is the world's biggest transaction services platform, and it operates in 95 markets around the world. How should we invest in the platform, both from a technology and a talent standpoint? How do we drive the right client engagement? And I'm going to... I'm sure we're going to touch on some of those subjects today, but that's really been top of mind for us, that how do we continue to propagate the Services agenda and provide solutions to our clients across the globe in very, very challenging macro environment-
Yeah
... and therefore, growing profitability, growing wallet share as part of that proposition.
So speaking of challenges, it's been quite a last 13 months in terms of U.S. trade policy and geopolitical tension. So would love to hear from you in terms of what, what are your clients saying, and what's the current sentiment, and how is Citi uniquely positioned to help clients navigate an evolving geopolitical and macro environment?
So I would say, you know, our clients are generally very large, significant clients who have global footprints around the world or have aspiration to have a global footprint around the world. So our conversation with our clients, given our preeminent incumbency position, is always robust. And if I go down the list of clients, starting, frankly, with the corporates in a very challenging environment with Venezuela recently, with U.S.-China relations, with Russia-Ukraine, and then at the start of the year, with the change of the administration, the changes around tariffs and supply chains.
If you think about all these factors, you know, the ability for us to have a conversation with our clients and give them solutions that encompass all of the regions around the world with all the markets that they operate in, I think has been invaluable, both from a client and from a Citi standpoint. So what are we hearing? Firstly, on the corporate side, I think the focus on access to capital, the access to financing, the access and the ability to continue to run treasury operations around the globe while making sure that their supply chains are unimpacted and the ability to finance their working capital and frankly think about free cash flow. So that's on the corporate side. Talking about banks and broker-dealers.
Banks, broker-dealers are focused on whether, for their retail business, their Wealth business, or for their markets business, they're thinking about best execution-
Mm-hmm
... at the cheapest price point. So that's been a big area of focus for us as well in talking, providing solutions to banks, broker-dealers, who are, again, a significant part of our solutioning set. Thirdly, thinking about public sector. How do we help public sector become more efficient? And at this time, when fiscal deficits are running significantly higher, public sector is also on a mission to think about how do they get smarter, how do they think about, you know, making their Services, whether it's managing their payments agendas around the world, or whether it's managing their holdings of treasury bills and securities around the world.
Then, if you continue to move towards the investment side, asset managers are, you know, with the entire move to private markets, how should they think about their middle and back office structures? And as part of their public holdings, how do they think about driving down the cost of what they've invested in to allow them to eke out every single basis point of incremental performance that they can show to their investor community. So that's been a big, big agenda item. And last and not the least, I would say, if you think about the fintechs, they're, as the bank with the largest fintech client set in the industry, we're actively engaged with our fintech clients to basically say: How do we help you provide access to the Bank-in-a-Box, the Banking-as-a-Service-
Mm-hmm.
-to help them run and manage their businesses around the world? So, I would say fairly challenging environment, but, I think Citi's unique capability to provide that global expertise, coupled with local knowledge and market-leading innovation around how we connect the dots for our complex clients, has been mission critical, for our clients, and actually to continue to engage and drive some of the profitability that I'm sure you see, and your investor community sees across the board.
To that end, your ability to help your clients navigate through challenging times has translated into quite a strong year.
Yes.
In 2025. What drove that performance, that strength across both TTS and Securities Services?
Yeah. So, we had a record fourth quarter, and if you look at our numbers, we had record revenues in Q4. We basically, if you look at our full year numbers, we delivered $21.3 billion of revenue, which was up 8% on a year-over-year basis. We delivered a ROTCE of 28.6%, again, which was a number that slightly higher than what we had set out for ourselves on Investor Day. If you look at the underlying components of that profitability and that revenue growth, our NII grew about 12%, and our fees grew 6% on a year-over-year basis across the board. And if you look at the underlying drivers, our deposits grew about 7% on a year-over-year basis.
Our loan book was up about 9% on a year-over-year basis. Our cross-border volumes in dollar terms were up 10% on a year-over-year basis. Our clearing volumes were up 5% on a year-over-year basis, and our AUC, our Assets Under Custody and Administration, was up 24% on a year-over-year basis. That was basically injecting more clients into our operating platform. But also we outstripped MSCI growth. MSCI grew about 17%, so we saw net new inflows into our business. And I think underpinning all of that was, I talked about this robust client dialogue. We had record number of new wins also in 2025, on an aggregate basis across our business.
So we, you know, that effectively allowed us to deliver what we delivered in 2025, but also helped set us up for a strong, strong start to 2026.
So, Shahmir, maybe just, oh, if we could pull up, how are you performing relative to the 2022 Investor Day guidance and Services Investor Day guidance?
Yeah. So, it's a great question. I think, as I mentioned earlier, fourth quarter was very good for us. And if we go back in time, I would say in the 2024 Investor Day, we talked a lot about investing in our business. And a lot of that investment in our business is what has helped us drive some of this agenda. And if I can share with you some numbers, in the 2024 Investor Day, what we had laid out was a low to mid-single-digit revenue growth number and a ROTCE in the mid-20% range. Our year-over-year number that I just talked about-
Mm-hmm.
was 8%. Our 2023-2025 revenue CAGR was also 8%, as we think about this. And if you look at our revenue CAGR since the 2021 Investor Day, that was at 14%. So I think generally speaking, I think from a revenue and a ROTCE standpoint, we have been delivering above the benchmarks we had set for ourselves. If you think of share of wallet for a second and use that as a metric, that was the second set of metrics we had set. We've gained more than 200 basis points of wallet share, both in the institutional TTS space, and we have gained more than 200 basis points of wallet share in the Securities Services space. So those are, again, two strong data points.
The third one is we had set ourselves a goal of growing our wallet share in the Commercial Bank business-
Yeah
... where we had a suboptimal share. We have doubled our wallet share in that business as well. So across the share of wallet metrics and across revenue growth and return metrics, we have over-delivered from that standpoint. And as I mentioned earlier, I think if you look at our volume growth drivers across the board, whether it's cross-border volumes or it's AUC, AUA, generally speaking, we have over-delivered across those metrics. So we feel cautiously optimistic about how we position, and we look forward to talking about our new metrics as we think about our upcoming Investor Day in May.
Yeah, excited for May 7th. You've done a great job in deposit volume growth, in particular since Investor Day. You know, as we think about the areas, the segments that you're focused on, can you maybe provide some color on where we can expect the revenue loan deposit growth to come from?
Yeah. So, we had laid out our strategy, Erika, in the 2024 Investor Day, and what we had said, basically, and this, what I'm gonna say, is really a continuation of that, and we're go- we're gonna go into much more detail during the Investor Day. But the way I would think about as the underpinnings for growth in our business are, first and foremost, is our, what I would call large institutional clients. These are Fortune 500 companies... that have global operating business models. These companies continue to evolve and drive their growth around the world. So we bank more than 80% of these companies.
We're either their number one or number two bank as part of their agenda, and our goal is, really making sure we're delivering that thought leadership and that engagement model in partnership with Banking and Markets and Wealth to drive that conversation forward. So really deepening our wallet and our penetration with the large clients, which has helped us, as I mentioned, with the wallet share growth we've already seen, but that will continue to drive that momentum. So that is what I call the first big building block of what we want to accomplish. I think the second one is our Commercial Bank clients.
Commercial Bank clients, we talked about a wallet share, which was smaller than what I would call in our relative to our peers and our competitors, and that is one big agenda item for us, that as we've continued to innovate and invest, we thought our Services really stand up well, having really spent a lot of time modernizing our platform, making it easier for the small to mid-sized companies to access. We thought that that would allow and enable these small to mid-sized companies as they have growth agendas, given e-commerce development and given platforms now available, various marketplaces and other platforms available for clients to continue to grow their business. We have plugged into that particular agenda, and that's the double-digit growth in market wallet share sizes that we've seen.
So I think both of those strategies have come to the fore and will continue to be integral to our growth agenda. The third one, which I think is absolutely the... I would say, the third leg of the stool, is you can have the right client strategy and the right client construct, but you've got to marry it up with the right product setup and the right innovation infrastructure investment agenda. We talked about it during our 2022 Investor Day and our 2024 Investor Day. Investing in our payments platform, in our liquidity and deposit-taking platform, our trade and working capital solutions platform, coupled with the investor and issuer side of the business, has been mission-critical for us.
So how we've grown this wallet share is with the right client strategy, coupled with the right investments that we've made over the last 5, 6 years in this business, and that's helping us monetize this growth agenda that we've delivered over the last few years.
So, pivoting a little bit, Shahmir, at Services Investor Day, you talked about the marriage between conventional rails and new rails, like blockchain through Citi Token Services. You've also told us about real-time 24/7 U.S. dollar clearing, cross-border instant payments, real-time funding, target balancing, Citi Payment Express. You know, over the last few years, can you highlight how you've continued to innovate?
Yep.
to meet client needs?
Yes. So I think for us, as we think about how we run this business, I think there are a few core principles, and I talked about them during the Investor Day. The first one is, while we run a business, which is in 95 countries, we think of our business as a no borders business. We think of our business as enabling our clients to run their treasuries almost as if they were 24/7. That's our operating principle. The second one is that, and I talked about this at length in Investor Day, is we want to invest, we want to innovate, but we don't want to just invest and innovate for the purpose of investing or innovating. We want to integrate.
So for us, innovation is all about integration and actually monetizing that investment by integrating into an existing or a new set of services that allows us to have the right anchor clients and drive that agenda over time. So for us, I think that has been a mission-critical agenda, and we continue to drive that forward. And I'll talk a little bit about some of our investments, where we've either invested recently or we've integrated recently. I think the second thing I just mentioned here is AI.
Yeah.
AI is, you know, it's, it's a big talking point, and as I think about AI and the ability for AI to liberate more, PNL, the ability for us to engage with our clients better, the ability for us to run our, back and middle offices better, the ability for us to run our technology platform better. So, we've thought about AI with the following lens. You know, if you think about Tech Assist, how do you help your technology team become better programmers? How do you cut down programming and therefore use the same tech dollars that you're using and actually develop code much faster? The second one is Agent Assist. How do you help agents who are operating, acting for clients, actually help them with information access?
And so as we operate in 95 countries, multiple applications around the world, how do you help agents around the world? Then I talk about Client Assist. How, when clients come and engage with you on various platforms, how do you inject AI and give them the information that they would need to make the best possible decision? Then Ops Assist, our operators around the world, running the biggest operations team in the industry, how do we streamline the operating processes? And last, and not the least, is Service Assist.
You know, as our clients engage with us, the biggest custody platform, the biggest payments platform, the biggest institutional deposit taker platform, how do we help our service agents around the world, help them make the right decisions for our client and continue to make sure we are delivering for our clients day in and day out? So AI for us is mission-critical. We continue, we're building that out. I'll give you one example.
Yeah.
As you think about onboarding, you know, you're dealing with some of the most sophisticated companies around the world, operating in some of the most difficult countries around the world. Think about an account opening process. You've got to tick the boxes from a local regulatory standpoint and a documentation standpoint. Imagine getting a stack of documents which you previously had when you received... you had to review. So a person would take hours to review a set of documents before they could sign off, you know, and actually allow for the account to get open to make sure that local regulatory requirements and Citi requirements had been fulfilled. What took hours is now taking minutes as part of our testing.
So what we're doing is, still with the right oversight, making sure that we are truncating and collapsing some of the processes we've been running as part of this agenda. So it's really helping us make our platform more agile and reduce friction across the board. I'll give you a few more examples on innovation. Recently, we rolled out what we call Single Event Processing, Single Event Custody Processing for asset servicing around the world. Think of it this way: You have a sub-custodian and a global custodian. As you think about an asset or an equity, or a fixed income instrument that's held around the world by a global investor, imagine when the instrument has a corporate action, a fixed income event, or a corporate action event around an equity offering.
Imagine you touch the instrument a few times between the sub-custodian, the global custodian, and the asset manager before the CIO can then deliver or use the funds that are freed through this process. So the ability for us to collapse at the sub-custodian and global custody level and touch it once is a big enabler for us. We're rolling that out across the globe. We are the only bank in the world that can actually roll that out, simply because we run the biggest sub-custody platform in the industry, and that's one of the things that we are pushing out and helping our investor community drive their agendas. A few other things. We talked about Citi Payment Express.
Mm-hmm.
We talked about it at our 2022 Investor Day. At that time, we had just started. We'd imagined it. We were building it out. We've built that out. Now it's rolled out to more than 20 markets, in about 22 markets right now. But 40% of our payment flow transaction is now on this new modern infrastructure.
Mm.
So I talked about integration. So not just innovate for the sake of innovation, but building a brand-new payments architecture, and we've now got 40% of our volumes running through that infrastructure. 24/7 clearing, we talked about. So I think as we've rolled that out, we've got about 300 banks now using 24/7 clearing, trying to provide, through conventional rails, the ability to move liquidity and money movement around the world, as we provide clearing services for most of the banks around the world. And lastly, I would say on digital assets, again, another major innovation agenda item.
As digital assets have developed, we've built out our own internal blockchain that we've effectively connected a number of our critical Citi branches to, and we are using that to move money and liquidity around the world for the benefit of our branches and our clients. So our aspiration is always to continue to innovate-
Mm-hmm.
Listen to our clients, and make sure that as we innovate, we are putting our clients on the platform, and we are commercializing it, and which allows us to drive incremental revenue, but then, frankly speaking, improved client satisfaction and better client solutions across the board. So, I could give you multiple more examples, but, but innovation is at the heart of what we're doing, as part of the Services agenda.
Now, that was very helpful. Thank you, Shahmir. You know, your peers at J.P. Morgan, I think, mentioned a stat about maybe 40% reduction in unit cost in terms of KYC. So, it's going to be very interesting in terms of how this evolves. So let's maybe talk a little bit about the synergies. You know, I mean, obviously, you know, Citi is a, you know, large, diverse firm. Maybe we could talk about the power of synergies in different lines of businesses within Citi.
Yeah. I think great question. We, we think about synergies all the time, particularly as you think about, Jane's agenda.
Yes.
I think one of the things Jane really thinks very hard about is: How do we have an environment or an enterprise that has a best-of-breed operating model across the board? And therefore, if you're best of breed or you build the right infrastructure and architecture, how do you make sure that you're driving... regardless of business, you're driving your process towards that best-of-breed operating model? So I would say we in Services think about two types of synergies. One is internal to Services. As you think about the five businesses I just talked about, payments, liquidity, trade, issuer, and investor, we think about: How do we collapse some of the stuff that we do on a day-to-day basis? Onboarding, for example. We onboard a client for custody.
They're also a client for our treasury services business. How do we collapse that onboarding? How do we think about cut-off times from a liquidity standpoint? How do we provide the best cut-off time for a market participant who's moving money, but also a market participant who's settling securities in the same market?
Mm-hmm.
So how do we think about best-of-breed platforms in every market and drive that agenda? So whether it's onboarding, whether it's servicing, whether it's sanctions, or whether it's product capabilities, I would say that is mission-critical for us as we think about that, and that's what's helped us drive a lot of this operating efficiency. We've improved our operating efficiency, something like 300 basis points within Services over the course of the last few years, and that's allowed us to deliver some of the returns we've been delivering, is through driving a lot of these synergies and automation and platform modernization across the board. At a firm level, I would talk about business synergies.
For example, when we go out and talk to an investor client, an asset manager client who's managing money, when we go to that client and offer them our custody services or our agency lending services or a combination thereof, we think about: What are you doing for FX? How are you thinking about hedging? How are you thinking about building those services and providing a set of services between markets and services together so we give them a singular pipe to access cross-border payments? Think about going to one of the largest fintechs in the world and giving them a cross-border payment pipe that gets them access to an FX rate and gets them access to a payment platform. How do you integrate that together?
So those are partnerships that we've built out within the institutional bank. I'll give you another example. You think about an M&A transaction, and you think about a client executing M&A. Maybe they need an escrow service. Maybe they are doing a capital market issuance, an equity or a fixed income one. Maybe they need an issuing agent. Maybe they need a paying agent. So how do we think when we speak to the client and offer them our services, how do we start as an integrated proposition? We can do your M&A advisory. We can also help you with your depository receipt.
We can also help you with your capital markets. So that's how we are bringing the organization much closer together, and therefore, our partnership with Wealth, with U.S. Credit Cards, Markets, and Banking is absolutely mission-critical for us. As we think about our client's wallet, we think about that wallet together as part of that proposition.
So Shahmir, maybe just double-clicking on this topic of working with other businesses. How do you partner with the other business to most effectively use the corporate loan book in context of client returns and wallet?
First and foremost, I think having been a former banker myself, I've been at Citi for about 30 years, and I've been in banking for about 20 of those years, and then, for the last 15-odd years, I've been part of our country management and our regional management, and then markets and Securities Services. But having seen a number of our businesses, I think our partnership between our various businesses could not be stronger today, as I sit here and see it. And a lot of that comes together not just through how we engage with our clients, but also how we think about capital extension, and I'll talk about capital extension. First and foremost, as we sit and talk to a client and think about a client's wallet, we think about that wallet across all businesses.
And then, as we extend capital, whether into a revolver, whether into a term facility, or whether into a facility that helps the client access capital markets, we always think about, are we extracting maximum value for this capital? That capital extension could be through the loan book. That capital extension could be through the market side. That capital extension could be through the Services side, through our trade and working capital finance book. But we have a holistic picture of our clients, and a lot of the investment we've done is actually building that holistic picture of our clients under our client organization, and really thinking about how do we maximize bang for the buck for capital. And so, account planning-
Mm-hmm.
Pipeline building, and then having a balance sheet forum where clients get discussed with every new transaction coming to the balance sheet forum, and then talking about what our aspiration is. That aspiration that goes into the banker scorecard, the banker goals, and our sales team's goals on the business side. And so it's a joint partnership, joint accountability in driving that cross-sell, in making sure that we get the right bang for the buck for what we are delivering to the client through our capital window.
So it's a process that we've significantly improved the engagement on over the last couple of years, and my aspiration is that we will continue to see more traction on it, and us getting even better on it, given all the the MIS that we've built out internally to help make better decisions around our clients.
It should help our clients, and it should help the firm.
So before I ask this last question, maybe just remind the audience that if you wanted to ask Shahmir a question, you could scan the QR code and submit it, and I could read it from this iPad, and we also have mics around the room. So, you know, as we think about Investor Day ahead and the success that-
Yeah
... you have already generated for shareholders in this business, what are your priorities for 2026? You know, you indicated at the Services Investor Day that your through-the-cycle returns are in the mid-20s.
Yeah.
You did print, as you mentioned a couple of times, 20.6% this past year. How do you ensure you defend your position in the space, and is there a path to sustainably higher returns?
Yeah, that's a great question. And I look forward to discussing, Erika, in our upcoming Investor Day, but I would leave the audience with just a couple of takeaways, right? Firstly, this is a business that has been built over several decades, but as part of Jane's focus, we have significantly increased the intensity around the investment agenda for this business. And you can see it from all the investments we've made and how we're bringing those investments to market much, much faster. Similar to how a fintech would go to market is how we're driving this agenda, is how we think about putting those investments out there. Secondly, I would say we're a through-the-cycle business. So we talked about our not just our...
and what we've delivered since the 2021 or the 2022 or the 2024 Investor Day. But I would also add one more data point for the folks that from an investor standpoint, if you look at, go back to 2015, we have delivered a revenue growth of 8% CAGR-
Yeah
... over the last 10 years. So the way I think about it is, that our strategy continues to be unchanged. We will continue to execute on the strategy that we've laid out, and we look forward to laying out our aspirations around the go-forward agenda, particularly around returns, as well as we think about the future. But our goal, our aspiration, will continue to be to invest in the business to drive much better and improved client engagement and client solutioning, while making sure we are innovating to drive revenue growth, to drive profitability growth, and drive wallet share growth. So that is mission critical for our success, and that's something we will continue to focus on, and we look forward to the Investor Day in May to talk more about those numbers.
Great. Any questions in the room for Shahmir? No questions on... Oh, sorry, we do have a question on the iPad. Thinking long into the future, how do you see the durability of services revenue streams if blockchain tokenization proliferates across the industry? Aren't many of the nowadays considered crown jewels at risk?
Yeah, it's a great question. I would say, you know, as you think about, firstly, the world at large, one of the things you've got to think about is the world is not homogeneous. The world has borders, the world has FX controls, the world has liquidity controls, and the world has capital controls. So as you think about that world and how our clients navigate that universe, our goal, our aspiration, is to give our clients access to the best possible technology platform that helps them execute and manage their treasury on a day-to-day basis. So we've actually thought long and hard about the agenda and talking to our clients.
So as I mentioned earlier, we've already got a functioning, fully built-out blockchain, where we've got billions of dollars of client money moving across our pipes every month. As we talk to our clients and we build that agenda out, we do believe that the world will move at different pace in how they modernize infrastructure, and I think the world will be much more about integration and interoperability. So the winners in the space are going to be ones that can integrate what I would call conventional rails and digital rails or blockchain-based rails. We're absolutely on that mission. We are building and continuing to upgrade our conventional rails to be as 24/7 as possible.
We are building and investing in blockchain to build out our token strategies and tokenizing and helping move money using tokens around the world. We are also actively engaged with the industry across the FMIs to build out interoperability across the token universe. So I would actually say that we are trying to build the infrastructure of the future while making sure that we are driving our agenda across the conventional side as well. So as I mentioned, we're gonna have clients move at different paces, different economies move at different paces around the world, and we will continue to evolve and move with it.
I think our overall aspiration of being 24/7, of actually innovating and working with our biggest clients, and making sure we take our clients along and our clients take us along, is what's gonna help us continue to drive the agenda. And as I said, there won't be singular winners, winner and losers. I think what we will do is play our role in helping the industry continue to move forward and drive to that agenda across the board. But I do see a world where I see tokens, crypto, fiat, tokenized securities, all coexist. And over time, you're gonna see, and you're hearing this already, you're gonna see banks, FMIs, crypto players, infrastructures, continue to drive towards that agenda.
So I don't see a singular world, but what we see is a world where things work in concert with each other and continue to build that infrastructure of the future.
That's great. Anything else from the audience? Shahmir, thank you so much for joining us today.
Thank you so much.
That was a pleasure. Thank you.