Synopsis
Viswas Raghavan shares his journey from Mumbai to leading Citi's banking operations in over 100 countries. He emphasizes the growth of Citi's corporate and investment banking services in India and globally. Raghavan reflects on the importance of emotional intelligence as he advanced in his career. He highlights the challenges facing global banks in retail banking and foreign investments in India.
Viswas Raghavan is one of the world's most high-profile and well-compensated bankers. As executive vice chair at Citibank, he oversees teams in over 100 countries, delivering corporate, commercial and investment banking. Prior to joining Citi in a high-voltage move in 2024, he was head of global investment banking at JP Morgan where he blazed a trail as a dealmaker.
Under his watch, Citi has seen a rise in M&A work and fees both globally and in India, not to mention a steady drumbeat of senior bankers joining it. Vis, as he is known, speaks to Sruthijith KK on The Quest, a video podcast by The Economic Times, on his journey from Mumbai to Citi. Edited excerpts:
Mumbai is the city you went to college in. At Marine Drive now, what memories does it bring back?
I grew up here, so this is always home. Whenever I come back, I go through my ritual-having food, meeting friends from school. It brings back incredible memories.
Citi having a significant franchise here probably allows you to spend a good deal of time here as well.
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It does. Even when I was growing up, Citi was the most coveted employer. That iconic status is preserved, and now it's going from strength to strength. It is the best bank in India now. If you look at our corporate bank, it is serving the needs of Indian corporates and multinational corporates wanting to do business in India-whether it is in supply chain financing, trade financing, payments, cash management, FX swaps, interest rate derivatives. We are seeing incredible progress in the commercial bank. Across small and medium-cap enterprises, we are solving corporate finance needs. And in i-banking, we have been in every major transaction here.
The diversity of commercial banking is not adequately appreciated. Our MSMEs are growing in sophistication. Many are linked to global supply chains so they need crossborder banking.
Our typical client is a company that is growing rapidly, with evolving needs. They start with opening an account, getting working capital and the like. Very quickly, those needs morph into trade finance, supply chain finance. They are exporting to multiple parts of the world, so they need to open accounts there. Clients evolve, and Citi is part of the journey. As their ambitions grow, we flourish. That's very much the model. The world is getting multipolar. That plays to Citi's strength because we have been present in more than 100 countries for decades. We celebrate 125 years in India in 2027, which is incredible.
It has been 125 years as Citibank?
Citibank and its predecessor organisations.
From a graduate in Mumbai to the rarefied realms of global finance, what has the journey been like? What do you think helped you reach here?
Growing up in India was the best thing that happened to me. India has the knack of training you to see around corners. You see things coming before they happen. India nurtures that in you-the EQ of dealing with people, navigating complexities.
Your risk management becomes better because you grew up in India?
You are on high alert all the time. It heightens your instincts around expectation and anticipation. It's almost like driving in India.
Driving is a great example because you can't take for granted that others are going to follow the rules.
I say this to my kids, 'It's not about how well you are driving, it's knowing who is coming at you.' You need to anticipate what could happen. India drills that into you. It is also the camaraderie, the culture of team spirit. You played cricket on the streets. There were three holes in the middle of the street where you put the stumps. When a car came, you took the stumps out and let the car pass.
Improvise.
Exactly. Your antenna is finely tuned to human values. When you start your career, it is 99% IQ and 1% EQ. When you grow further up, that shifts to 90% EQ and 10% IQ. I don't want to diminish the IQ aspect, but the more senior you get, it's really not what you want, it's about getting everyone to do what you want. And unless everybody wants it, it's not going to happen. So there's no point in me saying, we want to be the preeminent bank on the planet. It is about getting everybody to want to be the preeminent bank on the planet-to buy into the vision, to live it, to breathe it. When that happens, magic follows.
From Mumbai, you moved to England to study further. When did you realise that banking is your thing?
When I was growing up, one is wired to be a doctor or an engineer. That cookie-cutter approach meant I did my undergrad in physics at the University of Bombay. I was lucky to get a scholarship from General Signal, a US company. They sponsored me to go to Aston University in the UK. I was working and studying. Then I really wanted to do an MBA. But I couldn't get a student loan. So I qualified as an accountant. One of the reasons I wanted to shift from engineering was because there was more money in finance. In hindsight, if I'd stuck to computer science and made it to the Valley, maybe nature would've taken a different course.
You haven't done so badly.
So I qualified as an accountant with Ernst & Whinney. That's where I met my wife. She was my manager on my first assignment at EW. Then it became Ernst & Young. It coincided with Margaret Thatcher's Big Bang. The City of London had an array of UK institutions-James Capel, Kleinwort Benson, SG Warburg, Barings. But with Big Bang, the market was liberated and all the US investment banks came over. We had Salomon Brothers, Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley. They all arrived.
My dream job was to be a bond trader at Salomon or Lehman. Quantitative trading was coming in. Computers were beginning to get used in trading.
You always had good quant abilities?
I like math. Big Bang was the breakthrough because the City was looking for computer science-trained, mathematically oriented folks who would look at trading algorithms and the like.
"On work-life balance, I have a strong view. In life, the most important thing is that you enjoy what you do. If you enjoy what you do, it solves everything. I enjoy what I do. I don't view it as work. I genuinely love doing a deal. I love showing up for work."
— Viswas Raghavan
I joined Lehman Brothers. I was initially supporting the convertible bond desk and looking at their trading strategies, the profitability on trades, the delta hedges.... It was a fantastic learning experience.
Were these hard shops to work for?
Incredibly hard shops. It is very demanding, very technical. The learning curve is exceptional. Then I moved to the investment banking side, looking at equity capital markets deals.
When did you get the sense that i-banking is really the thing for you?
We did a convertible bond for a company called Hanson. Structuring that and getting it over the finish line was an amazing experience. I really got into the rhythm of dealmaking, in terms of structuring deals, pricing them, executing them. That was the first flavour, and there was no stopping me.
At these big shops there must have been a culture of excellence.
Even today, it is a culture of excellence, a relentless pursuit of excellence. There is no margin for error. You have to be at the top of the game. It's like any elite sport. If you're playing grand slams in tennis, you don't commit double faults, unforced errors. You have to win. It's six-nil, six-nil, six-nil. You have to really perform and put the client at the centre of everything. Raising the bar to serve the client is paramount. That was true then. That is even more true now.
A lot of the big names of your early career are simply not around. Lehman Brothers, Salomon Brothers. That tells you there is really no room for complacency.
Absolutely right. Salomon Brothers is now part of Citigroup. It's one of the legacy firms of Citi. An intelligence revolution is upon us. You have to disrupt yourself, so you cannot be complacent. You have to stay ahead of the game, and that is true not just for our industry, but every industry. The pace of progress and change and opportunity that is coming our way is going to be unprecedented. Change equals opportunity.
While Citi, JP Morgan and many of the big global banks do very well in India in terms of corporate banking, commercial banking and i-banking, they are kind of absent in retail. Why is it so?
For a multitude of reasons. One is domestic scale. If you want to cover India as a retail market, you have to be in every town, every village. You need to manage that scale. Then you need to make sure it is first-class business. Then you have to hold capital, hold liquidity and the question is if you then solve for returns. When you put all of that together, it is not always the best use.
If you take a bank, the basic raw material is capital and people. You need to get the best out of your capital and the best out of your people. Then the key is: where do you deploy the marginal capital? It has got to chase the highest returning opportunities. You look at the scale and nature of a local retail bank, in a market that is incredibly competitive where margins are tight, and you ask, 'Is this the best use of your capital when there are far, far superior returning opportunities elsewhere?' That's the call a lot of global banks take. You often find that banks are present where the margins and the return on capital are more appropriate.
But the ultra-high-net worth investors want access to global investment ideas, global options. They want to invest in the tech sector in the Valley. They want Hynix and SpaceX. That plays into our strength because we are serving all of those clients with those opportunities.
What has been the most complex deal of your career?
Gosh, I think all of them. There's always drama around every transaction. One of my favourite transactions is the Allianz deal [a 4 billion euro structured transaction]. We had booked a family holiday over Christmas break. The kids were little and we were in Mauritius at the time of the deal. We had a hotel room and the pool was just outside. And there were a lot of frogs in the pool. If I stayed in the room, one of the kids was crying or whatever. If I went outside, the frogs were croaking. I fessed up and told the client, 'Look, I am in Mauritius. I am on a call every day. You will not feel any difference, but what you are hearing in the background is frogs.' I really enjoyed that because it was a lot of hard work all through the Christmas holidays. It was also the year of the tsunami. There was an ugly tsunami and then we launched the deal in January [2005].
You are not a non-playing captain.
I like folks who get their hands dirty, in the trenches, who obsess over detail and who are in the fabric and the lifeblood of the clients. I left Lehman in 2000 and joined JP Morgan before the merger with Chase. The merger with Chase happens, and one of my first transactions was a $2.5 billion exchangeable bond for Telecom Italia, which was called OPERA Note-an out-performance equity-linked redeemable security. I used to love coming up with acronyms for securities. I worked on it with Jimmy Lee, who was an iconic Chase banker. When the two companies came together, this was one of the first transactions that showcased the power of the combined institution. Another transaction that we did was a 5 billion euro exchangeable for the German government and Deutsche Telekom, which, I think, is even today one of the largest exchangeable bonds ever done. Then we did an amazing deal for Allianz. It was a highly structured 5 billion euro package. So there was a catalogue of multi-billion-dollar transactions.
You spent more than two decades at JP Morgan. You worked quite closely with Jamie Dimon. What was it like working with...
Jamie? It was amazing. I've had the privilege of working with some exceptional people. I learnt a lot from Jamie. The beauty of this job is you never stop learning.
If you look at Citi now, we are at the forefront of all the stuff that is happening in the Valley, in the whole AI boom you are seeing. We've been really privileged to have worked on every one of these transactions. The landscape is shifting and you are learning with it. You never ever stop learning, and that's one of the privileges of this profession.
What is going on with AI financing? Is the circularity of some of it to be concerned about? Is there reason to be worried about a bubble forming in this area?
My head spins with the same questions. Our risk officers are all over it. I would say a couple of points. One, the potency of AI is off the charts. It is leapfrogging time to arrive at solutions that will be for the benefit of mankind. There is no disputing that. Second, right now, there is not enough compute available for the needs of the world. The US is way ahead of anybody else. China is not too far behind. But apart from that, no single nation stands out as being equipped or ahead of the curve in terms of meeting the AI needs.
"If you look at Citi now, we are at the forefront of all the stuff that is happening in the Valley, in the whole AI boom you are seeing. We've been really privileged to have worked on every one of these transactions. The landscape is shifting and you are learning with it."
— Viswas Raghavan
Will there be overcapacity? Absolutely. We will always overbuild. That is human nature. Are we there yet? No. Have we met the compute needs of the world yet? No.
Third, there are multiple bottlenecks. The chip capacity has been sold out. The order books of some of the biggest engineering companies are sold out. There is a new bottleneck, which is financing. You are seeing a flight to quality, which is basically, 'Okay, I've got finite resources, so which projects am I going to back?' So that's where we are at now.
But you don't want too much progress, right? If you have underwritten a generation of tech deals, and if that's going to become obsolete, then you have a...
...problem, right? It is not getting obsolete. That is the myth. There is this quest for super intelligence. So you are getting better, faster chips. But it doesn't mean that this chip is useless. It just goes someplace else, where you don't need super intelligence. There is a residual value, and it doesn't go to zero. It will always serve a purpose.
The last couple of years have not been great for India as a destination for foreign investors. What made global investors fall out of love with India?
I don't think it was out of love. It was an asset reallocation exercise. What you saw was an AI trade where liquidity flowed out of India and it coincided with the inflows into Taiwan, Korea and AI ecosystems in other countries. You have seen a rewind of that in recent weeks-an anti-AI trade. I don't like the terminology because I don't want India to be viewed as anti-AI in any measure because this is a country of innovation, expertise, intellect. Software is our middle name.
Exactly.
I want India to be part of the AI trade because embracing AI trade is going to be super important. We have a middle class that has thrived on the back of the services economy, and AI will be a great disrupter of that. Now the question being asked of companies and nations is, 'Are you AI native?' The second is, 'Are you an AI endgame winner?' If the answer to both is yes, then you are at least primed and ready for disruption. If it is not, then you are very likely to be in the disrupted bucket.
The resources that US and China can pump into AI are far greater than what India can muster. What should be India's strategy?
We are now in the AI infrastructure space. You are building the railroads for sustaining an AI-adapted economy. You are seeing the build-out, which is why there is a need for capital, financing and all the rest of it. You are now beginning to see the application layer that sits on this architecture take root, and there you are seeing champions, industry by industry. You will see companies that are going to piggyback on the power of AI. I see India dominating that application layer. That plays into our software skills, engineering skills. We have to be at the forefront of the evolution of that application layer.
Your move from JP Morgan to Citi created a lot of ripples. It is perhaps one of the legendary moves in banking. What is your mission at Citi? CEO Jane Fraser has said you bring a certain intensity to proceedings.
All of those ripples were unintended. I love building, I am obsessive about it. What Jane has achieved at Citi is remarkable. You always knew the potency and the power of Citi's platform. It's omnipresent. It's in every country and has a client reach that is super strong. Clients have a fondness for Citi. So you have the building blocks for making magic happen-that was the attraction.
On Investor Day, we laid out some of our key priorities. North America is a key focus area for us. Tech, healthcare and industrials are key verticals. Financial sponsors and leverage finance are two key focus areas. And in each of those, you are seeing flashes of what this platform can deliver. You saw Broadcom's $60 billion-plus financing package for its AI plans. When Blackstone and TPG bought Hologic, we advised and financed Blackstone. When CD&R bought Sanofi's OTC assets for $15 billion, we advised and financed CD&R. Come to India. Jio was a recent IPO. Then Tata Capital, NSE... the list goes on. Every multinational who wants to come into India, we are involved. We have become the de facto bank. The idea is how do we systematically replicate it country by country. I think the best is yet to come.
Does it make you uncomfortable when people talk about your compensation? Why do bankers get paid as well as they do? [Raghavan's $52 million compensation package upon joining Citi in 2024 made headlines.]
At the end of the day, you don't solve for money, power, title. It's almost a distraction. You have to focus on a job well done. If you focus on delivering exceptional outcomes, everything else is a byproduct. Banking is well compensated, but there are many other industries where if you focus on exceptional outcomes, compensation follows suit.
You are said to be a demanding boss. How do you get the best out of people without crossing a certain threshold? Also, is there a change in workspace where there is expectation for a greater work-life balance?
First, you cannot always expect nice things to be written about you. I've been doing it for 35 years and it's not always gonna be nice. A CEO called me and said, 'One only throws stones and sticks at trees that bear fruit.' That's a good line. You are only a good leader if you have good followers. People come to work for you because they trust, because there is camaraderie and kinship and an ability to have fun doing this thing together.
You asked me a question on compensation. With that comes expectation-an ability to deliver consistently, to deliver with no margin for error. The competitive forces are phenomenal. So you have to be constantly at the top of your game. Do I suffer fools gladly? Maybe not. The point is I don't expect anything from anyone that I wouldn't expect from myself.
On work-life balance, I have a strong view. In life, the most important thing is that you enjoy what you do. If you enjoy what you do, it solves everything. I enjoy what I do. I don't view it as work. I genuinely love doing a deal. I love showing up for work. When you enjoy what you do, you solve for that balance, it happens automatically. Yes, the demands are high, but it comes with client service. If a client wants to launch a deal on Monday, I'm not gonna be sleeping until this thing hits the tape on Monday. A lot of businesses are incredibly demanding; it's not unique to banking.
How are the leadership styles of Jane and Jamie?
They are exceptional people, iconic leaders. Jane reminds me a lot of when Jamie was getting started. You see her with clients-the impact she has, her empathy.... She is, once again, player coach, gets her hands dirty. She's on the road. She's tireless. Citi runs through her. She is passionate about what we are trying to build. She connects at a very personal level, and that is important.
You are widely seen as someone who will likely succeed Jane. Is that a job you would like to have?
That is not what I'm solving for at all, so.....
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