The engineers transforming Citi still have 87% of their work to go

The engineers tasked with dismantling legacy applications in investment banks may not have the most glamorous jobs, but they get a lot of recognition from their employer come quarterly earnings time. Citi's decommissioning team is already well above last year's pace, but it has a long way to go until the job is done.

Click here to follow our new WhatsApp channel, and get instant news updates straight to your phone 📱

Last year, Citi says it decommissioned around 390 apps, 6% of its total goal of 6.5k legacy applications. This year through to September, it already decommissioned 450 applications, which would bring the job to approximately....13% completion. 

This pace seems a little slow compared to some other banks; Deutsche Bank, for example, said it decommissioned 1.5k apps between 2019 and 2022, an average of 500 a year. 

Much of the transformation is happening in Citi's data systems, which are a source of both controversy and drama at the bank. In July, Citi was handed a $136m fine for making "insufficient progress" on these systems, which led to the bank changing the responsibilities of COO Anand Selvakesari, and promoting ex-PWC partner Tim Ryan. Citi actually decommissioned more apps in Q2 (190) than Q3 (150), so Ryan has yet to have a tangible impact.

It's not clear exactly how big the transformation team is, but it looks to be in the thousands. When Ryan joined, he took responsibility for 800 employees over Selvakesari. This was in the team that handled data transformation alone, and there are plenty of legacy applications outside that remit. 

Those thousands of engineers may be secretly happy that progress isn't breakneck. It's thought that, when this mass decommissioning across many banks is complete, the engineers behind it will be at risk of redundancy. In the previous example of Deutsche Bank, the transformation team hasn't received a shoutout during an earnings report since Q4 2022. The bank announced earlier this year that it was cutting 3,500 jobs "mainly in non-client-facing roles."

Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share? Contact: Telegram: @AlexMcMurray, WhatsApp: (+1 269 237 3950). Click here to fill in our anonymous form, or email editortips@efinancialcareers.com.

Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: all our comments are moderated by human beings. Sometimes these humans might be asleep, or away from their desks, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. Eventually it will – unless it’s offensive or libelous (in which case it won’t.)