Opportunities Analysis at Citigroup

Opportunities Analysis at Citigroup

Student Name

University Of Phoenix

April 2008

Executive Summary

Citigroup is recognized as the largest financial services provider in US and one of the leading financial services companies in the world. The company was re-branded in 2007 and is now called Citi. The organization is based in New York City. Citigroup was formed by the merger of Citicorp and Travelers Group in 1998. As stated in the about us in the Citi website, the organizations history dates back to the foundations of “Citibank in 1812, Bank Handlowy in 1870, Smith Barney in 1873, Banamex in 1884, and Salomon Brothers in 1910.” Citi is a behemoth organization with hundreds of diversified businesses merged through its 200 plus years of history that provides a large portfolio of diversified financial services to customers in the United States and worldwide. Citigroup has a workforce of over 320,000 employees around the world, and has over 200 million customer accounts in more than 100 countries around the globe. “Citi is organized into four major segments вЂ" Consumer Banking, Global Cards, Institutional Clients Group, and Global Wealth Management.” (How Citi is organized, 2008). These four major segments provide a variety of specialized financial services to customers worldwide. In 2007, Citigroup was recognized as the world’s largest company by Forbes Global 2000. As per Mergent Online, for 2007 year end, Citi reported 159 billion in revenue with total assets of 2.2 trillion with a net income of 3.62 billion. Even though the organization reported a fourth quarter loss of 9.83 Billion these losses were absorbed by its gains.

Citi has now been actively reviewing all businesses and making the necessary changes and enhancements to processes to ensure such losses never occur again. As a whole the organization is in the process of implementing plans to upgrade to a newer system that will replace the SOE or Standard Operating Environment from all machines with the new Desktop Standard Initiative (DSI) with either Vista or XP windows based operating systems.

The Markets and Banking division composed of Global Banking, Global Capital Markets and Transaction services all which fall under The Institutional Clients Group a business that was formed and realigned in 2007, will be the first to implement the upgrades to DSI in XP and Vista Operating System options. This new project is aimed at providing improved, faster processing and cutting edge technology for the employees that will transfer to our customers in the services they receive. Citi is very devoted on providing innovative services to the customers strictly on the basis of their needs. Inconvenience for their customers is something that the company cannot afford to entertain. The company has thus come up with the idea to strengthen and modernize the current Standard Operating environment by retiring the current SOE systems and implementing a DSI solution in Vista or XP OS and additionally also upgrading of the Microsoft Office 2000 suite to version 2003 or 2007. These two opportunities will improve computer systems performance and give Citi a better position in technology improvements against our competitors. In this analysis, the environmental scan, customer’s needs, opportunities reviews, technology road map and several areas will be reviewed for Citi. It is explained in the report about the link between the goals and objectives of the company and the new project proposal. As the company is highly focused on the customer needs the new system will enable them to deliver even better quality results.

Expository reports and inference trees

Box 1: IT and evolution

1. Retire current SOE systems

2. Implement a DSI solution in Vista or XP OS

3. Upgrade Microsoft Office 2000 to version 2003 or 2007

4. MS software evolved by selection. For example …

5. So software evolves by selection.

7. IT includes hardware and software.

8. So IT evolves by selection

Environmental scan of Citigroup:

Like any other business, Citigroup too is influenced by the changes in the environment in which it operates. The major environmental factors that affect the company are political, economical and social conditions. Among all these the economic condition is the factor that has the most influence. Any changes in the economic factors affect the company directly. As stated in the Times вЂ" Colonist, “The International Monetary Fund said yesterday that losses stemming from the U.S. subprime-mortgage meltdown could swell to nearly $1 trillion US, far outstripping the Asian banking crisis, the U.S savings and loan crisis, and even the Japan banking crisis of the 1990s.” This is a prime example of an economic situation that can affect banking institutions in a negatively. As more lenders default and are unable to pay off their loans or organizations that borrowed are unable to pay their debts, the banking institutions are forced to report these loans as losses and write them off. Similarly, political instability will adversely affect the better functioning of the company in the countries it operates. The changes in the attitude of the society towards the company also have an impact on the functioning. Citigroup also competes in the Online Banking, Private Banking, and Asset Management sectors.”(Citigroup competitors, 2008). The major competitors of Citigroup are Bank of America, Deutsche Bank and JPMorgan Chase. These are some of the leading banks in the world along with Citigroup.

The flow of reasoning is downward through the rows, and from left to right within each row.

For example, figure 1 below is the inference tree of the argument in box 1.

Reasoning errors

The strategies of the competitors of the company are