Citi's New Slogan Plays Well With Insomniacs

Vikram Pandit is relatively new to his position as CEO of Citigroup - the supermarket of financial services - but he's absolutely killin' it so far.

Citi was never an easy ship to take the controls of. Between getting called out by hot babes and recording two consecutive quarterly losses due to suffering billions of dollars in writedowns, its shares have fallen nearly 55% in the last year.

But Vikram, who always appears to be smiling and looking so impishly whimsical, has buckled down and done some serious work. Not all of it sounds great, but it's work nonetheless.

One of the first piece of business Vik got around to was instituting a new slogan for the Citi brand. Playing off that old cliché that New York is the city that never sleeps, all commercials for the big bank will now end with 'Citi. . .never sleeps'.

The Wall Street Journal released an early copy of the new Citi commercials, but DealBreaker's version feels so much more fitting for the bank everyone is becoming tired of:


Citi New Slogan - Watch more free videos

The next thing Vik came up with was to aggressively prune Citi's balance sheets. The Financial Times reports:

Mr Pandit is thought likely to announce up to $15bn in reductions in Citi's operating expense budget, which stood at $61.5bn at the end of last year.

Cuts are expected to come from a radical overhaul of the company's sprawling information technology systems as well as from job losses.

Aw hell yeah, Vik! Coming in blastin' with some serious firings, are we? Now who's smiling, right? Many news sources are predicting that this 'lightening of the load' at Citi is the only good route they can go.

But now with all those insomniac slogans, those employees keeping their jobs will have a reason to stay late and work.



FT: Citi to identify $400bn of potential disposals, May 9, 2008

DealBreaker: Citi Never Sleeps: The Ad Campaign, May 7, 2008

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Biz Babes: Citigroup's Dominatrix

She went from being a little known analyst to becoming the voice Wall Streeters fear the most.

Meredith Whitney, an analyst with Oppenheimer & Co., made the gutsy call of blasting Citigroup (owners of Citi Bank) in an October report. At the time, other analysts did not agree with her take on Citi, and she was forced to stand out in the crowd.

The day after her report was released, shares of Citi dropped tremendously, and days after that, Chuck Prince, the CEO of Citi, resigned from his position.

Whitney realized what many other analysts refused to believe. Bloomberg described her report, saying:

She pointed out that the company's dividend now exceeded its profits -- the bank was handing money back to its investors faster than it was taking it in from its customers. The U.S.'s biggest bank was being managed to ensure only its bankruptcy. Citigroup would need either to raise capital, sell assets or slash its dividend -- possibly all three.

This was a shocker for the market, but it only caused Whitney's reputation to grow. A month later she would issue equally provocative reports lambasting the Wall Street banks for being at the mercy of the credit rating agencies.

Whitney keeps it coming, and now her name is one of the most feared on the street. She is known for coming down hard on the big banks and has proven she knows what she's talking about.

She now says she gets death threats and harassing calls at her home and office on a regular basis. Apparently, some people don't like losing money when she calls out their stock.

But there's no need to worry about her safety, she's married to a former WWE-champion wrestler, John Bradshaw Layfield (JBL). He definitely knows how to bust a few Wall Street skulls if needed.

Bloomberg: The Rise and Rise of Analyst Meredith Whitney, April 9, 2008
New York Post: Citi $licker Goes To The Mat, November 3, 2007

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