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Ian Cramb, COO, Citigroup
Petrol head and rising star of the banking industry…

By Andy McCue

Published: Wednesday 10 September 2008

Ian Cramb is one of the increasing number of IT chiefs moving up the corporate ladder into wider operating roles, rising from CIO to become COO of the Citigroup's consumer business in 2006.

It's a huge job, with responsibility for an annual budget of some $2bn and almost 14,000 employees.

Operations for the consumer business - essentially what UK banks call 'retail' - cover the usual technology issues a CIO would be expected to handle, plus call centre activities, operational processing, fund transfers payments, reconciliations, credit initiation and collection, and the internet channel.

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But it's not just about cost and expense. Cramb is accountable for about $500m of revenue that comes through the call centre, while the internet channel brings in about $250m of revenue, along with recoveries from bad debt.

Cramb's career path to the top hasn't followed anything like the traditional IT path but he says the greatest step change was going from being CIO to COO.

He says: "The biggest challenge I faced was not just seeing things from a technology perspective but seeing things from an even broader perspective - and to get people to stop thinking that I was just a technologist and that I could bring a different mindset to some of the issues that were there."

Cramb joined Citigroup in 1992 on its graduate recruitment programme after earning a degree in French and German. "[My degree] had nothing whatsoever to do with banking, don't know whether that's a good thing or a bad thing," he says.

His first couple of years were spent working within the internal audit function of the treasury capital markets area, before becoming the risk head for operations on the capital markets side by the mid-1990s.

In 1997 Cramb moved to Citigroup's warrants business, a continental European product and now part of the bank's equities business. He rose to become COO and then deputy head of that business by 2000. His brief was to expand it into new geographies, specifically Asia and the Americas.

"There was a lot of contact with central banks, regulators, all those sorts of guys, and with a watching brief over the infrastructure making sure that was set up properly," he says.

Cramb's boss then became CEO of Citigroup's retail business in Germany and she asked him to become COO.

He says: "It was a major step in terms of number of people because previously it had been a bunch of investment bankers and traders who probably didn't number more than 30 or 50, to 2,500 people doing call centres and those sorts of things. It was a very different challenge."

His brief was to make his position redundant within two to three years by combining back-office functions that were located around the globe, which involved dealing with the workers' council and trade unions in Germany.

Restructuring job done, Cramb was asked to become CIO for Citigroup's western European consumer business to sort out some big projects that were in danger of going off the rails.

In one of Citigroup's many reorganisations, its western European consumer business merged with the emerging markets to cover Europe, the Middle East and Africa (Emea).

"I became the CIO for that [business], with a bent to getting rid of all the legacy systems that we had and we had many of them," he says.

In the middle of 2006 Cramb was asked to take on his current role as COO for the Emea consumer business at Citigroup.

Inevitably Cramb spends a lot of his time travelling for work, regularly clocking up to two or three days per week out of the country - but he doesn't regard it as a chore: "I love it. I love seeing the different cultures."

With a wife and daughter he's rigorous about work/life balance, and rarely stays late at the office - despite the long-hours culture of banking.

He says: "I get in around 8am or 8:30am but I'm gone by 6:30pm. Unless there's a real crisis going on, you'll never see me in the office past 6:30 at night. I always want to make sure I'm home in time for dinner with the family, which is probably helped by the fast car on the way home."

The fast car he refers to is one of the many in his collection.

"I have some very fast cars which I like thrashing around. That's my wife's most frequent complaint and [the cars are] where I spend my money. I have the James Bond one but I also have a 1970 E-type as well, crossing both ends of the spectrum in terms of the modern, from the Aston through to the E-type."

Cramb is not ashamed to admit that his meteoric rise through the Citigroup ranks is partly down to "a lot of good luck", and says he has been lucky to have had exposure to many parts of the bank's business.

He says: "Although I have spent 15 years within Citigroup and its various incarnations, I've done probably more jobs within Citigroup than most people who have changed corporations four or five times. I have seen the investment banking, the capital markets side of the house, I've seen the retail side of the house, I've run the front office parts of the business and I am now running the back office parts of the business."

These days it's tough times for Citigroup and the rest of the banking industry as the credit crunch bites. The banking group has posted losses of $2.5bn for the three months to the end of June 2008 along with $11.7bn of write-downs. It has also cut 11,000 jobs in the first half of this year.

As ever, IT and operations are one of the key areas the business looks to for cost cuts.

Cramb explains: "When it comes to cost we've been through it many, many times and financial services will go through many more cycles before we are all retired. We are going to go through another cost-cutting exercise - there's no secret about it. The CEO has said it publicly but I don't think it's just about cutting heads or cutting expenses. It's about using the money that we spend in a wiser way.

"Where is the biggest return on investment? Where do we want to be from a geographic or from a product perspective over the next five to 10 years? And [how do we] make sure we invest in those areas? That's really what the cycle is at the moment. There will be cuts but everyone in the industry is facing that, no one is immune from that, whether they are part of the credit crunch or whether they are just part of the general economy that's exposed to lowering growth."

Looking more broadly at the CIO role, he says some big challenges are in store.

"We [CIOs] say that we want to be on the board, we want a voice. But being on the board of a company or being on the exec committee of a company is…about him or her being able to speak about things which are not just technology-related.

"You wouldn't expect the finance director of a company just to talk about how the numbers add up. You'd expect him or her to talk about business strategy and how we are going to invest in the future."

That's unlikely to be a challenge for Cramb, however, as he continues to rise through the executive ranks in the banking industry.