Citigroup Inc. (NYSE:C.PK) Morgan Stanley US Financials, Payments & CRE Conference Call June 14, 2023 2:30 PM ET
Company Participants
Mark Mason – Chief Financial Officer
Conference Call Participants
Betsy Graseck – Morgan Stanley
Betsy Graseck
Thanks, everybody, for joining us. I do have a disclosure to read. For important disclosures, please see Morgan Stanley research disclosure website at www.morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. The taking of photograph and the use of recording devices is also not allowed. If you have any questions, please reach out to your Morgan Stanley sales representative.
Okay. Well, with that out of the way, Mark, I’m so delighted that you’re able to join us here this afternoon. Mark Mason, CFO of Citigroup.
Mark Mason
Thank you, Betsy. Good to see you.
Betsy Graseck
I think as everybody knows. Mark joined Citi in 2001, right, with prior responsibilities including the CFO of ICG, responsibilities for CCAR, CEO of Citi Private Bank, Head of Strategy, M&A for Citi’s Global Wealth Management. The list goes on and on.
Mark Mason
22 years is a long-time.
Betsy Graseck
Well, you know, every year is a new year and there’s a lots of opportunity to have impact. And so appreciate your time with us today.
Mark Mason
I’m happy to be here. Thank you.
Question-and-Answer Session
Q – Betsy Graseck
So I did want to kick off a bit on the strategy and I think you’re in Phase 1 of the strategy that you and Jane outlined at Investor Day. It seems a period of executing and investing. And from your perspective as CFO, could you give us a breakdown of how you think Citi has fared as you’ve been going through Phase 1? What are you pleased with? What would you like to maybe move faster? What’s not going as well as you would have liked?
Mark Mason
Yeah. Well, I think I’d say, one, I feel very good about the progress that we’ve made. We always like to move faster, but I think we’re making very good progress. If you think about just in March of 2022, where we talked about our vision, we talked about the strategy of these five interconnected businesses and we talked about where we really wanted to focus between now and the medium term.
And you look at the performance that we’ve had in 2022 and in the first quarter, we’ve largely delivered on those metrics and guidance that we gave at that point in time. So top-line growth in 2022, the expense growth that we targeted in the way of investments, the building of capital that we talked about in line with getting to 13% by the middle of this year. Many of those things, we’ve made progress on throughout the course of the last 15 months or so.
What I’d highlight specifically is some of the core businesses where we have competitive advantage, right? So I think about our TTS business, which is part of services. I think about our security services businesses. Both of those businesses delivering significant top-line growth both in 2022 and in TTS over 30% in the first quarter of 2023.
Some of it rate-driven, yes, but a lot of it driven by deeper penetration of our multinational clients, starting to get some growth and momentum with our commercial and middle-market clients. Penetration in North America with our Security Services business is higher win rates across the board there. The cards portfolio. We talked last year about getting momentum out of that. We’ve seen good average interest-earning balance growth.
Coming through this year, both services and cards, high-growth, high-returning businesses for us delivering on that. And I think important Betsy is the diversification of the business model, right? So, obviously, the world is very different than what we talked about at Investor Day, rates you pick your inflation, et cetera. But we have strength in services that has been able to offset some of the pressure we’ve seen in investment banking and that we’ve seen in wealth, with the investment banking wallet being down.
We have a markets business that benefited from the volatility and uncertainty last year that again was able to offset some of the other parts of the franchise. So very pleased with that. We’re making I think very good progress on the investments. We’ll talk more about that, I’m sure, but transformation in particular.
And so feel good that we’re hitting our expense targets and the guidance that we’ve given and feel good about the ability to bend the curve, we can talk more about that later. And then capital, as I mentioned, we delivered on that 13%. Early, the end of last year versus the middle of this year, both through earnings generation, but also through optimization of use of the balance sheet. That revenue to RWA metric that we’ve talked about coming out of markets, a business where it’s really important to make sure you’re using the balance sheet wisely.
Betsy Graseck
So everything is going great?
Mark Mason
No. I mentioned in investment banking. We see pressure from a wallet point-of-view in the area of wealth. We aren’t seeing the momentum that we’ve like in part because of the macro-environment, pressure in Asia last year played into that. I feel good about the KPIs, underneath that, for example, in Investment Banking, technology, healthcare, the pipeline in that space. I think we’re positioned well in terms of what’s on the come as we do see the market rebound. We’ve built-out on the front-end on wealth. So as that rebounds, I think we’re well-positioned, but everything hasn’t gone as well as we’d like. But I think the diversification has helped to get me to a place of comfort, and I would like to move faster, always want to move faster.
Betsy Graseck
Okay, great. So that’s a great opening to dig into and unpack as we go along the question list. I did want to bring up a question around what’s going on just with the regulatory environment, not for Citi, specifically, but for the industry overall.
Mark Mason
Yeah.
Betsy Graseck
And just wanted to get your sense as to how you’re thinking through the potential ramifications for Citi of the regulatory environment that is likely to unfold?
Mark Mason
Yeah. The first thing I’d say is, we should take a step back and the banking industry as a whole, I think is in a very different place than we were in at the financial crisis. And a lot has changed the capital positions of these banks, the liquidity positions of the banks, the balance sheet just more broadly is a lot stronger than it was back then. And Citi specifically as well, I mean, we’ve been very focused on that and feel very good about that.
We obviously just a couple of months ago have seen a lot of pressure, particularly on the regional banks. And whenever something like that impacts players in the industry, it’s bad for the industry as a whole. I’m happy that we were in a position of financial strength to be able to step in and help stabilize. But as you sit here and ask the question in terms of the regulatory environment, it does put pressure on the regulatory environment for our industry.
And so what does that pressure potentially look like, it comes in a number of different forms. The most recent we’ve heard about, which is the higher FDIC cost, right, that banks across the industry will have to bear on the heels of the failures that have taken place. It’s likely to come in more significant regulatory oversight from examiners, more intense oversight from examiners is likely to play out there.
It’s likely to play out in more stress tests, that all the banks have to run and likely some regulatory changes perhaps targeted towards the regionals and some of the smaller mid-sized banks. And it potentially has an impact on capital, which we’ve all read and heard about that capital can come in the form of what the stress capital buffer looks like, coming out of the recent DFAST CCAR exams.
We’re waiting on those results now. It could come in the form of what the Basel III end game results ultimately look like. So the implications could come in — are likely to come in many different forms. We’ll see what happens at the end of the month with some of the proposals that come out.
We’ll go through those. We’ll understand those. We’ll prepare our organization to be responsive to them and think about the implications it has on our strategy, and we’ll figure it out and move forward.
We were talking before we got on stage here. We all face Sacker some number of quarters ago. We don’t talk much about it now. It required an increase in capital. We had to be thoughtful about that approach.
We figured it out and manage through it. I do worry about Betsy, the idea or the possibility of whatever increased capital requirements might mean for a credit crunch and might mean for implications around shadow banking. Because those are things that I think we should all be thoughtful about and mindful of and I hope our regulators consider all of those things as they work through some of the proposals that are outstanding.
Betsy Graseck
Well, that’s a great segue into the next question, which is really trying to understand what are your corporate clients looking for? What are you hearing from them? What are you seeing from the consumer side? Is there an interest in leaning into risk and loans at this stage or?
Mark Mason
Our corporate clients, I think, are concerned about all the things that we’ve been talking about. So I’m certainly hearing concern around inflation. I’m hearing concern around the direction that rates are likely to go in and we got clarity on that, it sounds like this afternoon. But people have been very focused on that. What does a recession look like and the severity of that? CFOs that I talk to all over the world are focused on how do I tighten the belt, so to speak, as it relates to expenses, to prepare for an environment where there may be slower growth.
Broadly speaking, balance sheets are pretty strong, but people are still looking to shore those up, in order to have flexibility as valuations perhaps stabilize and there are opportunities to capture growth on the other side. And so those are the types of things that the corporate segment is focused on. We’re very engaged, and we’ll talk more about the banking environment, but there’s still discussion around supply chains and how those things morph. But a lot of expense management, how do we ensure we’re efficient is where I’ve seen a lot of the focused dialogue.
On the consumer side, consumers have continued to be quite resilient. We are seeing savings rates come down. We are seeing movement as it relates to delinquencies and payment rates, but largely on the lower FICO score type customers. And so the uncertainty is important to play through and we’ve seen a lot of that. It’s good. We’ve got the debt ceiling behind us, but all of those things have impacted sentiment.
Betsy Graseck
Okay. Just bringing it to Citi and the results, performance, et cetera, maybe we could just flex to the second quarter. And if you could give us a sense as to what you’re seeing in terms of the markets and investment banking performance.
Mark Mason
Sure. And I started to allude to it a little bit earlier. So we had a really strong second quarter last year in markets, particularly in our fixed income business. As we’ve gone through the second quarter here, continue to have very good corporate engagement, corporate dialogue, the debt ceiling concerns certainly did weigh on the investor, client base in particular in April and May.
We haven’t seen volatility or activity pick up in the early days of June here so to speak. So we’ll have to see how that plays out. So as we sit here kind of quarter-to-date, we’re looking at markets revenues down 20% and we’ll have to see how — year-over-year and we’ll have to see how the balance of the quarter, next couple of weeks kind of play out.
On the investment banking side, it’s been tough to call exactly when the wallet will rebound. We’ve seen some green shoots in terms of debt capital markets activity and that’s been good. We continue to have very good dialogue. I think we’re well-positioned, as I mentioned earlier, having invested in certain sectors. The wallet is down about 25% year-over-year and we’re likely to be in line with the wallet. But again, we’ll see how it kind of plays out over the next couple of weeks.
As I take a step back and think about the full year, our guidance. I’m not changing our guidance regarding the full year. Despite some of that movement, I still feel good about $78 million to $79 billion of total revenues, exited impact of divestitures. So I feel good about that. I would say that the mix of revenues in the quarter, in particular is such that I’m likely to see a tax rate in the quarter that’s probably 200 basis points or so higher than the full year guidance I gave. I gave full year guidance of 23% to 24%, in light of that mix in the quarter, it will probably be a little bit higher.
Betsy Graseck
Okay. But full year tax rate stays the same in an expectation that the rev mix will be a little bit different as we go through three and four. Okay. Just on trading just to ask the follow-up question there. Any color around impact equity, fixed income or both roughly in that same range on a year-on-year basis?
Mark Mason
Look, I mean, obviously, fixed income, we’re very strong in fixed income have a strong presence with our corporate clients that helped to add stability to the revenue stream there, well-positioned from a rates and currency point of view and the macro continues to evolve. And so generally speaking likely to do better there relative to equities, we’re trying to continue to grow our equities business and grow the prime balance activity, in particular, but likely to skew more favorably to the fixed income.
Betsy Graseck
Got it. Okay. I wanted to move over to interest rate sensitivity. And we did get the news just before you came on stage that the Fed is pausing — so that’s exciting. I’d love to get your reaction to what you think about that. And really the question here is how do you expect your rate sensitivity to evolve over time? And how are you positioning for the potential of a rate decline in the future or the potential for a continuation of a rate rise depending on what happens over the next two quarters?
Mark Mason
Yes. Well, let’s see, the color around the rate move that was just announced is probably being discussed right now, right? So we’re probably missing out on some of the color commentary. But from what I read, I actually thought the way it was positioned and the way I read it was quite smart.
So it wasn’t just a pause or a skip, but there was reference to the potential for further hikes later in the year. And so to me, that was a — I read it as a messaging around. We’re going to see what the impact has been thus far. But we’re prepared to lean in on the idea of tempering inflation if it doesn’t continue to go down to levels that we’ve talked about. So it felt like a smart way to handle it. We’ll see what the color commentary provides.
To get to your question around NII, we obviously look at this all the time and manage it. I think, quite effectively from an asset liability management point of view, we want to be flexible, particularly in light of kind of how the view on rates has continued to evolve.
We provide a fair amount of disclosure in the Qs and the Ks that show sensitivities around large rate moves on our entire book of exposure, right? And, if you look back, what we’ve tried to do, and if you look at 2022 and you look at that data that we provide, it will show that we have maintained an asset sensitivity position such that we could benefit from rising rates. We’ve been very deliberate around that.
When we — when you look at kind of the first quarter, you’ll see that we started to reduce that position of asset sensitivity, particularly in the US around the anticipation that at some point, rates are likely to come down early next year, end of the year, something like that. And you see that — if you look at — again, when we do this, this IRE analysis, it assumes a 100 basis point move across the curve cross currencies, against a static balance sheet, right.
And with that analysis in the first quarter showed was that if that were to happen, we’d see about $1.7 billion of NII full year impact, positive, $1.7 billion. And the SKU in terms of the mix there was about 80-20 with about 20% of that coming from US dollar and the other 80% coming from all other currencies, right?
And that trend, if you look at that trend line has skewed towards the all other currencies in light of what I said, but also the mix of our portfolio. And so we are actively managing towards the view of where we think rates are likely to go so that we can obviously manage that through an NII point of view.
Your other question was with regard to — what if there were a rate reduction or a rate shock in the other direction, and we provide that analysis to and what — again, same analysis in terms of 100 basis point static balance sheet, cross currencies across the curve, and that would yield about $1.8 billion of a reduction.
Now remember, with that reduction in rates, there’s also an impact to AOCI as you pull back the par, but that would be about $1.8 billion with a skew of call it 30-70 in terms of US dollar versus non-US dollars.
Betsy Graseck
So fairly equally balanced to each of those outcomes.
Mark Mason
Again, yes, assuming static balance in all of those other caveats that I mentioned.
Betsy Graseck
Now you do have an active balance sheet. And one of the assets that comes with a relatively higher level of interest, right, is the credit card book. So I did want to just dig in there a little bit. You’re clearly a large U.S. card issuer. And I wanted to see what seeing with regard to customer engagement trends, account acquisition, consumer demand for credit is — are we at a point where you feel consumers are appropriately levered? Or do you feel, based on the behaviors you’re seeing in spend and borrow that there’s room for them to lean into leverage?
Mark Mason
Yes. Yes, it’s a great question. And I guess, let me come at it from a couple of different angles. So one, the point I started to mention earlier, which is just overall liquidity. We’ve seen kind of deposit levels in the industry come down.
When you look at kind of the personal saving rate for April was about, I think, 4.5%, which is well below the 7.2% or so average and so savings rates are coming down. People are dipping into those saving pools that they had coming out of COVID in, I think, a meaningful way. So there’s kind of liquidity lens, so to speak, that you’re seeing play out.
I think the second component that I’d speak to is around purchase sale activity or spend and when I look at spend, spend is still growing year-over-year, but at a decelerating rate from what we’ve seen in prior quarters and the areas continue to be travel, entertainment, areas such as that. Some of that is going to be driven by inflation, but some of that actually is actual spend that’s kind of continuing to grow. I would imagine that we start to see some continued pressure on that, but still have growth as we sit here now.
And then what’s happening with balances. And so here, we’re actually seeing payment rates start to temper particularly in the lower FICO score customers. They’re coming down across the board, but more so in the lower FICO scores. We’re seeing delinquencies start to pick up. The second quarter is a little bit tricky because you’ve got some seasonality there. But when you look through, again, on the lower FICO score, you’re seeing a pickup in delinquencies.
And we’re seeing loss rates start to pick up. And if you, again, lower FICO scores. I’ve talked about historically average FICO scores across both our port — I’m sorry, average loss rates across both our portfolios. Last quarter, I talked about us running close to 70% of those levels.
We’re seeing that start to tick up. But nothing abnormal. They are more in line with expectations and some of that on the heels of the acquisition or new clients that we’ve been bringing in. So I think importantly, look, savings rates coming down, but purchase sale activity continuing to show some momentum, average interest-earning balance growth, which obviously contributes to NII and losses and delinquencies increasing but manageable.
Betsy Graseck
And what about credit and other sleeves that you’re exposed to, say, in the commercial real estate sleeve or in C&I, corporate or credit?
Mark Mason
So, again, remember, in both these portfolios, we tend to skew towards the higher quality risk, right? So 80% of the consumer side, greater than 680 FICO score, 85% on the corporate side, investment-grade names, 90% when you look internationally or either investment-grade multinational or their subsidiaries. So we skew towards the higher quality. We’re not seeing anything abnormal as it relates to corporate NALs or corporate losses.
Our commercial real estate exposure is very small in the scheme of our total balance sheet and relative I think to others. Office within that is small as well. And so no particular areas of concern, we’re well reserved across both of these that — we’ve got a 2.7% reserve-to-loan ratio. So we feel very good about the $20 billion or so that we have in reserves against the portfolio.
Betsy Graseck
Sir, I wanted to flip into expenses and operating leverage in that discussion. And going back to what we talked about earlier, since you are executing along the plan that you’ve put out there, one of the questions I had was just around the investments that you’ve been making. So the expense efficiencies are coming through there’s still investments to make. And I guess the question here is how far along are you? Is there a ramp in acceleration from here or do you feel you’re at pace? And — the other question is, how do you think your investments might change in terms of what you’re focused on going forward?
Mark Mason
Well, one, I’m glad you referred to them as investments. That’s exactly the way we think about it, the spend that is, and the investments kind of comes across a couple of different buckets, but not the least of which is kind of business-led investment.
So think about some of the build-out we’re doing on the front end for our commercial banking business that covers that middle market segment where we can offer our TTS services. So building up front and they’re building out on the front end of wealth have been areas that we’ve been investing in, and in a minute, I’m going to talk a little bit about the importance of repacing that investment in light of the environment that we’re in.
There’s also the transformation and risk and control investments that we’ve been making that you’ve heard us talk about. That are geared towards improving our operations and addressing some of the consent order items that we need to address. And technology spans in some instances in both of those things and in and of itself has its own bucket. Think about the importance of investing in cyber and what have you.
And investments, Betsy, I know you know this is not something that you do and then stop, right? And so I can’t sit here and tell you that we’re going to stop making investments at some point in time. But we do expect that investments will start to pay off, which is really, really important.
I want to talk just specifically a little bit about the middle bucket, the transformation spend and how that’s evolving to your question. So think about the early days of the transformation spend and improving our operations where the spend is largely around designing the plan, developing the plan, ensuring that we’re addressing all of the operational issues in that design, and you’re bringing on people.
You’re hiring a lot of people. You’re hiring consultants. You’re hiring third-party vendors to help with the crafting of that. We’ve moved squarely into the execution, right, and as we move through execution, that spend is going to move from consultants and has moved from consultants and third-party spend, still going to be people intensive but going to lean into the technology aspects of that spend book.
And over time, that technology, as you — as we implement those platforms, you’ll no longer need — we’ll no longer need the same level of people that we have at this particular phase. So we are in that phase.
We’re shifting towards technology and people and working towards that phase where we’re reducing people even further as we realize the benefits from that technology as we use that technology to automate a bunch of activities that we have to do manually today. And we talked at the earnings call, Jane has talked about examples of our wholesale credit risk platforms that we have and the ability to move that to a common underwriting process.
And that common underwriting process means that you don’t need thousands and thousands and thousands of people over time because it’s standardized in the approach that we’re able to use. We talked about a smart platform that we’ve implemented across our markets business that helps with the actual reduction of operational risk of fat fingering entries across the different platforms that we have, implementing things like that, again, reduces operational risk reduces operational costs.
We talked about legacy platforms and equities and eliminating those. Often with a legacy platform, you actually have to run multiple, you have to run the new platform, right, while you run the old platforms to ensure your new one is ready and doesn’t miss anything before you can start to reduce those. So those are examples of where we’re investing and how it’s morphing and both of those things play into the bending of the expense curve that I’ve talked about a lot that will start to come next year.
Betsy Graseck
Okay. And into Phase 2 and then 3 as well? Okay. How does pursuing the IPO in Mexico impact this at all, if any?
Mark Mason
So let me approach it this way. So let’s break down the expense trajectory, if you will. So we talked about 2023, I gave expense guidance of $54 billion — roughly $54 billion, excluding the impact from divestitures and excluding the FDIC charge that we’re likely to experience. So target for ’23 is to deliver on that.
’24, I talked about bending the curve. This is all with an eye towards getting to the return targets that I have in ’25, ’26 medium-term. Bending the curve means bringing down our absolute spend in dollars between third quarter and fourth quarter of 2024. How does that happen? That happens from a couple of ways.
One, we’ve got seven of these consumer countries that we’ve now exited. And with those exits, the costs go away and we’ve been working very hard and successfully at driving out the potential stranded costs associated with those exits. That’s going to help to bring down our expense base as we continue to make progress against that.
The other is the investments that we’ve been making the last couple of years will start to help reduce the operating cost, the structural costs of the place. We’ll start to realize some of the early benefits of that in 2024. And then the third is around organizational simplification that both Jane and I have talked about.
So think about it, when we exit 14 countries, that creates an opportunity not just in the country, not just in the region, but globally as well. So I’ve got to ask myself, how can I rethink the way I run my finance organization since I no longer have those 14 consumer countries, how might I reorganize to do that. And we’ve started to do that work. That’s the third contributing factor to bringing that cost down.
Now the exiting of Mexico, Mexico carries about half of the total cost associated with these exits, $3.5 billion or so, that cost won’t go away in 2024 because we’ve now moved squarely to an IPO. Despite that, I still expect to have my cost curve bend in the third to fourth quarter. Important to point out, while that cost won’t go away from a Mexico point of view, neither will the revenues associated with Mexico. And Mexico is accretive to us. So I just want to highlight that. So that’s kind of the expense story.
I’d highlight one more thing that I think is important on this topic, which is I’m keenly focused on delivering on that guidance and those targets and getting to our long — our medium-term returns. What that means is that the investments that we’ve made in this environment we’ve got to repay some of those, and that’s what we’ve been doing.
And so I talked last quarter about severance costs that we had incurred in the first quarter. As I sit here in the second quarter, we have, at this stage, year-to-date, but between now — between the first quarter and now, we have incurred costs, severance costs associated with about 5,000 head count that we will be reducing across the firm, largely in banking, markets and functions.
So front end related resources that we’re going to bring down. And in the quarter, there are probably about 1,600 of those heads were funded in the second quarter here. That’s going to result in my expenses for the second quarter being about $300 million to $400 million higher than the first quarter, not all attributed to that, but largely attributed to those restructuring or repositioning charges that I had to incur, still going to deliver on my guidance for the full year, 54 divestitures, FDIC, but important that we remain expense disciplined around driving cost out and capturing efficiencies. And sometimes that means reducing headcount.
Betsy Graseck
And so just to make sure on one point, the stranded costs associated with some of the consumer businesses that you’ve exited will start to come out over the next 12 to 18 months?
Mark Mason
Yes. And then — there are three — it’s going to take some time, but the answer is yes to your question right? We have three wind-down businesses, Korea, China, Russia, so there’s costs associated with those. Obviously, there’s stranded costs, a little bit associated with Mexico. So there’s still going to be some in the cost base longer term, but we will start to get the benefit of that yet.
Betsy Graseck
Yes. Well, I realize investors have been looking for that understanding of when the stranded costs would start to come out, right? So that’s helpful. In the last couple of minutes here, I guess, just wrapping up a question around the CET1 targets that you’ve got. You’ve got this CET1 target of 13%, you’re already above it, right? And the question is when you’ve got the medium-term target of 11% to 12% on ROTE. Can you just give us a sense as to how you triangulate between your CET1, your ROTCE, the capital and the expense improvements that you’ve got in bending the cost curve and how you see the next year or two years as you move into Phase II and III evolving?
Mark Mason
Okay. There’s a lot there. So let’s take it in pieces real quick. So we ended the quarter at a 13:40 CET1 ratio, that included capacity that I built — that we built in order to absorb the potential impact of a sale of the Mexico business and the currency translation adjustment that will be associated with that if it were a sale, right?
So we built up that capital position in order to do that. The sale, obviously, we’ve moved towards an IPO and moving towards that IPO — we — as we said we would look at buybacks on a quarterly basis. We looked at capital. We looked at buybacks and it was late in the quarter, but we did resume buybacks this quarter. We’ll get probably about $1 billion or so done given when we started and we’ll look at that on a quarter-by-quarter basis.
As I think about the longer term — the medium-term of returns. The medium-term comes from a number — delivering on those medium-term returns comes from a number of different drivers. So you’ve got obviously revenue momentum, and I’d point to again, those strong businesses that we have TTS, security services, et cetera, except we’re contributing to a 4% to 5% top line growth.
We’ve got that expense base and bending the curve associated with that. I talked about a less than 60% operating efficiency as we get into the medium-term. So that dynamic is going to be really important. The normalization of credit, which again, I think we’re starting to see that play out, well-reserved for how that plays out.
And then the exits as well as some of the other things like earnings accretion and what that means for SCB, GSIB, et cetera, will contribute — should contribute to how we think about our requirements going forward, including our management buffer, which we carry about 100 basis points of a management buffer.
Now obviously, the regulatory environment is changing. We’ll have to see what that means both for the near term and the medium-term, but those are the important levers that we’re managing as we get to that 11% to 12% return.
Betsy Graseck
And so bringing it all together, any main points that you want investors to take away about Citi’s current positioning and where it’s headed over the next few years?
Mark Mason
Sure. What I’d say is I think our vision is clear, our strategy is clear. It’s proven resilient, I think, in some very uncertain times over the past 12, 15 months or so. We’re focused on execution. For us, it’s really about building, rebuilding credibility.
That means the proof points that we can put on the board that are consistent with what we told you we’re going to do is what we’re focused on. Transparency is really important for us to provide to you all and we’re committed to getting to these return targets. We think there’s a lot more value in the firm, in the stock, and we believe that as we deliver on those proof points, that will show up in where we’re trading in our multiples.
Betsy Graseck
Super. Mark, thanks so much for joining us this afternoon. Appreciate your time.
Mark Mason
Thank you.
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