When Andy Sieg, the newly controversial head of wealth management at Citi, arrived in his role from Merrill Lynch in 2023, he came with a particular ethos. The Wall Street Journal says Sieg held a town hall in which he told his new colleagues to stop managing-up. This message was so popular that Sieg received a flood of supportive emails as a result.
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18 months later, it seems that Sieg may not have embodied his own ethos. Sieg is not commenting and Citi is standing by him, but Bloomberg reported this week that there have been complaints about Sieg’s alleged tendency to shout at and belittle colleagues. This is despite the fact that Citi CEO Jane Fraser, who personally hired Sieg, has regularly praised him. Citi says Sieg is simply “hard charging”, but if you’re working under him, it seems you may have a different opinion.
It’s not just Sieg, and it’s not just Citi, although as Fraser shakes-up the organisation there are complaints that Citi’s investment bank is similarly subject to management by decree. “There’s a lot of managing by numbers,” says one insider. “Vis Raghavan has got Jane’s support and everyone knows that. He has a huge mandate.” Some say they’ve barely seen either Raghavan or Achintya Mangla, his number two. “I don’t know what they look like in-person,” said one London MD a few weeks ago.
Hedge funds, which used to be comparatively immune to politics, are also becoming more political beasts. The big multi-strategy firms now employ thousands of people and are increasingly adding business managers and COOs. Alpha is important, but so is the ability to navigate internal politics. As former senior bank employees move across to funds, they’re taking the political culture of banks with them.
This is particularly the case in hedge funds’ support functions. Top people typically have portfolio management backgrounds and don’t understand the complexities of trading technology. “It’s all about managing up here,” one senior developer at a multi-strategy fund tells us. “The CTO lacks the technical ability to understand what’s going on. His real skill is being a political beast.”
Complexity is to blame. For all Jane Fraser’s Bora Bora delayering of 7,000 people, Citi is still a complicated place. Speaking last month, Fraser told Euromoney that 50,000 people there now have new managers; understanding how those managers are performing on qualitative as well as quantitative metrics is almost impossible. At HSBC, where newish CEO Georges Elhedery is similarly shaking things up, there are comparable complaints of poor management and inexplicable decision-making by a cabal of former corporate bankers from Citi.
What executives most want to hear is that costs can be cut and roles automated without impacting revenues or profits. Senior managers fluent in this language will thrive. “It’s all about AI here now,” says the developer. “The CTO has an AI working group and is telling senior managers that he can make a difference, but we all know that the foundations and the infrastructure are far too wobbly for it to work.”
As one senior banker described here yesterday, the managing-up epidemic is having real implications for everyone downstream of it. “I am desperately trying to keep deals moving and using all my skills and scraping every available resource to do so,” she said, describing 18-hour days and burnout amidst restructuring and incompetent new managerial hires. “I am crying in the bathrooms.”
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