Good morning.
Fortune senior editor Claire Zillman here, filling in for Emma.
We at MPW Daily write a lot about the glass cliffs, the well-documented phenomenon in which boards turn to women leaders when a corporate cleanup job is exceedingly difficult or impossible.
Jane Fraser stepped into such a scenario when she became CEO of Citi in March 2021. The appointment was historic in that it made her the first woman to ever run a major Wall Street bank, but it was also a doozy of a turnaround job. Citi had repeatedly tried and failed to shed its reputation as Wall Street’s laggard and slim down from the gargantuan “financial supermarket” into which it had grown.
There was a risk her tenure would follow the familiar glass ceiling script, but instead Fraser defied it. This April, Citi logged its highest quarterly revenue in a decade. The bank’s all-important return on tangible common equity hit 13.1%, the highest since 2021. As of mid-May, Citi stock was up about 83% since Fraser took over as CEO. And the bank has largely addressed regulatory reporting issues, and shed management layers and bureaucracy. That record cemented Fraser as
Fortune’s No. 1 Most Powerful Woman this year.
Fraser has led Citi’s comeback with a remarkable sense of self-assuredness, even through the rough patches (job cuts, divestitures, and big hires who’ve come under fire). When I asked her if there was ever a point when she realized her strategy was working, she said she never needed that kind of “aha” moment. “I never had a lack of conviction. This was the right path,” she said.
The question is what comes next, not just for Fraser but for women leaders on Wall Street. My recent feature on Fraser is the third in an unofficial series on women in banking. First came
my 2019 story on why Wall Street still didn’t have a female CEO; then came
a 2020 feature on how Fraser had finally broken that stubborn ceiling; and now
there’s the tale of her turnaround at Citi. Fraser, for one, is focused on shifting Citi out of repair mode and into a genuine growth trajectory. But while she does that, the hard truth is that she remains one of one at major U.S. banks. She’s hopeful that will change: “There’s a generation of incredibly talented female leaders who are coming up across Wall Street,” she told me. It remains to be seen when the second woman will break through, though there’s a fairly good chance the next one is already on the
Fortune Most Powerful Women list.
You can read my new feature on Fraser
here.
Claire Zillmanclaire.zillman@fortune.comThe Most Powerful Women Daily newsletter is Fortune’
s daily briefing for and about the women leading the business world. Subscribe here.
