Citi creates new role for its ex-chief compliance officer

Citigroup has established a new role for Mary McNiff, the megabank’s former chief compliance officer.

McNiff will serve as chief operating officer of Citi’s institutional clients group, according to an internal memo sent June 10 by Paco Ybarra, CEO of the division. The institutional clients group helps clients with cross-border banking, markets and services needs, including treasury and trade solutions.

McNiff will be Ybarra’s deputy, helping in areas such as risk and controls, operations and technology, business and process simplification and the group’s regulatory program, the memo said.

McNiff will also help Ybarra tackle “significant critical issues that develop in a single business line” and need input from other parts of the institutional investors group and Citi as a whole, the memo said. Her work will include “helping to drive effective stakeholder engagement” among the executive management team, board of directors, various regulators and other constituencies.

In the newly created role, McNiff will report directly to Ybarra. She will leave Citi’s executive management team and join the management team of the institutional clients group, a Citi spokesperson said Thursday.

The announcement of McNiff’s new job comes three months after the company said she planned to step away from the chief compliance officer position for a different role at Citi. Last month, the $2.4 trillion-asset company announced that Tom Anderson, former compliance officer in charge of Citi’s personal banking and wealth management businesses, would succeed McNiff.

The changes come as Citi grapples with two significant items on its to-do list: a business strategy refresh to simplify the company and improve long-lagging shareholder returns, and a multi-year effort to improve the firm’s long-standing risk management and internal control system problems.

For at least 18 months, the New York company has been trying to correct certain risk management “deficiencies” that were the subject of two consent orders issued in October 2020 by the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.

In May, Citi was freed from a 10-year-old consent order that faulted the bank for not implementing an anti-money laundering compliance program with adequate internal controls and effective independent testing.

Regulation and compliance

Citi names internal candidate as its next chief compliance officer

Tom Anderson currently serves in a compliance role overseeing personal banking and wealth management at Citi. He will succeed Mary McNiff, who is moving into a new position at the $2.4 trillion-asset bank.

By Allissa Kline

May 12

McNiff “played a critical role in the successful closure” of that consent order, the memo stated.

“This is a period of unprecedented change for Citi, driven not only by our efforts to address the issues identified in the regulatory consent orders … but also by our ambition to build a world-class infrastructure that seamlessly delivers for our institutional clients,” Ybarra wrote in the memo. “While we have made important progress to date, a significant amount of work remains.”

McNiff is the onetime CEO of the company’s bank and Citigroup’s former chief auditor. She became chief compliance officer about four months before the Fed and the OCC issued the consent orders.

She appeared on American Banker’s Most Powerful Women to Watch list in 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021.