In This Article:
This story was originally published on Banking Dive. To receive daily news and insights, subscribe to our free daily Banking Dive newsletter.
As if bankers needed another reminder that it’s not 2022 anymore. Citi last week said it would close its office in Málaga, Spain.
“Our primary Spanish location is Madrid, where we employ more than 220 people who are not impacted by this action,” the bank told Bloomberg and the Financial Times in a statement. “Unfortunately, this decision means that six of our colleagues in Málaga will be leaving the firm, and we will provide support to them during this process.”
Citi established the Costa del Sol outpost in 2022 to draw junior bankers who sought an alternative to the 70-hour (100 or more in busy stretches) workweeks they could expect in London or New York. Staff in Málaga, by contrast, could work eight-hour days and no weekends. The catch? Starting salaries were around half the low-six-figure pay that bankers could expect in busier hubs.
That didn’t curb interest. The Málaga office employed 27 bankers chosen from a pool of 3,000. “Many colleagues” based in Málaga will relocate to jobs in London and Paris, Citi noted last week.
The bank is closing the Spanish office as part of its strategy to “simplify the firm and make improvements to how we operate.”
Translation: Freewheeling 2022 lost out to austere 2023. That’s the year Citi announced a massive reorganization, wherein the bank trimmed several layers of management and aims to cut 20,000 employees in all by 2026.
At the same time, it’s exiting more than a dozen foreign retail-banking markets. However, Citi last week reiterated its commitment to Spain.
“Citi continues our strategic growth in Spain with a strong presence in our core business lines, which include investment banking, wealth and markets,” the bank said in a statement.
The office closure isn’t the only move in the banking sphere to indicate that 2022 is memoria non grata.
Overdraft walk-backs
The Senate and House in recent weeks voted to overturn a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau final rule that would cap at $5 the overdraft fee that banks and credit unions with more than $10 billion in assets can charge (among a couple of other choices).
Advocates of an overdraft cap argue the fee takes critical money away from customers. But cap opponents assert that customers are aware of the charge and figure it in as the cost of a safety net.
“When you start capping this fee structure … you start eliminating the possibility of people working paycheck to paycheck to make the decision to continue to use their resources in the most effective way,” Senate Banking Committee Chair Tim Scott, R-SC, said in March. “To do the right thing for the working class is to give them all the options and let them decide. Trust them with their own resources.”