In 2022, when Junior investment bankers complained about exhausting a boom in record agreements, Citigroup had a solution to bring and retain new talents: a better balance of working life that works on the coast of the Sun of Spain.
The American bank hired 27 analysts to work from a newly opened office in Malaga, a city favored by tourists and Spanish equally by its sun, sea, restaurants and bars, promising days of eight hours and free weekends.
Citi’s rivals described him as an advertising trick that would do little to change the culture on Wall Street. But Manolo Falcó, then co-head of the bank’s investment bank, insisted on “this is not a trick.”
Less than three years later, the office is closed and most staff moved to London. A handful of employees has been released when the sun is put in an initiative designed to break the traditional working conditions faced by Junior analysts who do much of the grunt work in the investment bank.
The former employees who worked in the Citi office in Malaga, as well as those involved in the project, say that reality differ with the bank’s tone, with many long hours with the hope of gaining covered roles in cities such as London and Paris.
“That flexibility that was marketed as the nucleus of the offer was not really respected,” said a former employee based in Malaga. “If you want to succeed and be transferred to London, you couldn’t do it without doing the same working hours as people there.”
The project was conceived by a trio of CITI executives: Nacho Gutiérrez-Oorrantia, who was then the head of Investment Banking and Citi investment banking; María Díaz del Río, chief of cabinet of that business; And he falca.
The team searched in different countries, including Portugal, Poland and the Czech Republic, but landed in Spain, encouraged by the mayor of the Malaga business approach.
Each of the analysts hired by the group of more than 3,000 applicants was assigned to one of the teams in the industry in London. If they worked well at the end of a period of two years, Málaga could be a springboard for a work in the city.
The process was largely administered by Del Río, who helped to assign the Junior bankers to different teams, and a senior manager was on the ground to administer the shifts so that analysts were not long hours.
But former employees say that the promise of a job in London, where they could be in the heart of the action, made them feel that they had to work more hours to stand out from their classmates.
“Many of the employees in Malaga were miserable,” said a person familiar with the initiative. “There were many promises but little progression.”
Citi said that his “emphasis on promoting the mobility efforts of colleagues and integrating our centers” was “evident in the successful applications of many of our colleagues in Malaga for positions in our centers in London and Paris.” The bank has not specified how many of Malaga’s employees were transferred to other places.
Junior analysts in Spain say they had more flexibility, but for those who wanted to follow it was a case of working the same hours as their London counterparts while earning half of the salary.
Citi analysts in Malaga said they were offered an initial salary of $ 55,000, while pairs in the main financial centers such as London and New York represent more than $ 100,000.
“It’s very subjective about what work you were doing,” said an employee. “The more you were willing to commit to the cause, the more projects you got.”
If Malaga employees were not willing to make them available until the early hours of the morning, they may not be assigned the most demanding mandates and that could spit their chances of moving, they added.
The banks have been dealing with how to attract and retain talent, particularly during the rise of the treatment that followed the fall of the pandemic when Junior employees complained about exhaustion and 100 -hour work weeks.
Goldman Sachs Junior bankers described “inhuman conditions” on a presentation platform that triggered a large number of new initiatives, some of which included at least a weekend free day or a limit for the number of hours that employees could record.
But a better balance between work and life between Junior employees disagrees with the demands of investment banking, where registered hours and hard work are often the currency to obtain a promotion.
A CITI employee in Malaga who moved to London called culture within the “truly special” office because he had gathered young people from different nationalities who were eager to do well.
“I will probably never get to work in an atmosphere like [the] One that I got there, ”said the person again.
But the disadvantage of a new initiative attended with anxious 20 and so many, launched shortly before the executive director Jane Fraser initiated a great restructuring of the bank, was a lack of supervision of the distracted managers of Citi.
Del Río’s departure as part of the restructuring in 2024 meant that there was no one to supervise the group and the employees in Malaga felt forgotten. “He had his cons, not having his elders there,” said a former employee.
When the office first opened in the summer of 2022, there was an office manager who supervised the kind of analysts who stayed for almost a year, they said. Subsequently, there was a rotating door of older people who entered and left the office and there was a long section where there was no senior presence at all.
“We had a period of six months where we were completely forgotten,” said the former employee.
“When there was no manager, it was pure anarchy, there were people who would not see for months, morality was so low,” they added. There was bad assistance in the office, since it was increasingly clear that Citi would probably close it and that some employees who went to other works were not replaced.
Citi said in a statement last week that the decision to close the office was part of its strategy to “simplify the company and make improvements on how we operate.”
Those involved say that Malaga’s office was a victim of the Bora Bora project, the internal code name used for the main CITI restructuring. With the river no longer in the bank and both Falcó as Gutiérrez-Corrantia in different roles, there was no one to support the cause.
“People lost their approach to [the restructuring] And without that force pushing it forward, who is supporting this? Another person involved with the program said.
For many of the analysts based in Malaga, the coast of Sunshine was a stop for a better job in London. But for those who expected the investment bank to offer something different, Citi’s proposal only put a plaster in an important problem.
One of the employees said: “They sold us sleep, but reality was much more different.”