Citigroup CEO Fraser paid $31.5m, well below her male peers

Jane Fraser took over as Citigroup chief in early 2021, the first woman to lead a big Wall Street bank. Her ascent was hailed as an long-overdue sign of progress.

Jane Fraser, chief executive officer at Citigroup Inc. Picture: Bloomberg

Citigroup paid new chief executive Jane Fraser $US22.5m ($31.5m) for her first year on the job. Ms Fraser, who became chief executive on March 1, 2021, was given a salary of $US1.33m and a cash bonus of $US6.35m.

The bulk of her compensation – $US14.82m – is in restricted stock tied to performance metrics.

Citigroup paid Ms Fraser’s predecessor, Michael Corbat, $US19.04m in 2020. Mr Corbat took a 21 per cent pay cut that year after regulators reprimanded the bank and fined it $US400m for failing to improve its risk-management systems. He made $US24m in 2018 and 2019.

In 2020, as president of the bank and head of its consumer operations, Ms Fraser made $US17.15m.

In her first year as CEO, Ms Fraser quickly set to work on a strategic refresh, announcing plans to shed consumer banking assets around the globe to focus the bank more tightly on a few core consumer offerings and its global corporate banking services.

She has had to juggle that work with the expensive and time-consuming internal transformations needed to appease regulators.

Investors are waiting for proof of her plan’s success. Citigroup shares fell 2 per cent in 2021, and the stock stands alone among its biggest peers in trading at a discount to its book value.

The stock is up less than 1 per cent since Ms Fraser took over as CEO. The KBW Nasdaq Bank Index is up 23 per cent.

Ms Fraser’s 2021 pay came in well below other big bank CEOs, who were richly compensated for a banner year on Wall Street.

Morgan Stanley’s James Gorman and Goldman Sachs’ David Solomon each earned $US35m in 2021. JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon made $US34.5m, while Bank of America’s Brian Moynihan was paid $US32m.

Citigroup has been pushing banks to disclose payment metrics that show gaps between men and women. In 2020, the bank said that the median pay for women globally at Citigroup was 74 per cent of the pay for men.

When adjusted for titles and experience, Citi said women make 99 per cent of their male counterparts. The bank has said its working on reducing the raw difference by increasing the number of women in higher-paying and more senior roles.

Ms Fraser’s ascent has been hailed across Wall Street as an long-overdue sign of progress for women in the industry. In September, at an event for the Women’s Bond Club, Ms Fraser said there was still work to do. “It takes a child’s bewilderment to demonstrate how absurd it is that a woman’s work would not be valued as much as a man’s,” she said.

The Wall Street Journal