Jane Fraser

Jane Fraser
Born	Template:Birth year and age
Birthplace	St Andrews, Scotland, United Kingdom
Nationality	British
Occupation	Banking executive
Title	Chief Executive Officer
Employer	Citigroup
Known for	CEO of Citigroup; first woman to lead a major Wall Street bank
Education	MBA, Harvard Business School

Jane Fraser (born 1967) is a British-American banking executive who serves as the chief executive officer of Citigroup, one of the largest financial institutions in the world. Appointed to the role in February 2021, she became the first woman to lead a major Wall Street bank, a milestone in an industry long dominated by men. Born in St Andrews, Scotland, Fraser built her career across multiple continents and business lines, rising through the ranks at Citigroup after earlier stints in management consulting. As CEO, she has undertaken a sweeping restructuring of the bank, including organizational simplification, cost reduction through job cuts, and significant investment in artificial intelligence and technology to modernize the institution's operations. Her tenure has been defined by an effort to shed underperforming businesses, sharpen the bank's focus on its core strengths in global cross-border banking, and instill a culture of higher performance expectations across Citigroup's workforce of more than 200,000 employees. Fraser's leadership has drawn sustained attention from the financial press and business community, both for the historic nature of her appointment and for the scale of the transformation she has pursued at one of America's most prominent financial firms.

Early Life

Jane Fraser was born in 1967 in St Andrews, Scotland, a coastal town known for its university and its association with the sport of golf. She grew up in Scotland and later pursued higher education in the United Kingdom before eventually relocating to the United States for graduate studies. Details about her parents and family background during her childhood years are not extensively documented in public sources.

Fraser has spoken in various public forums about her Scottish upbringing and the values it instilled in her, including a strong work ethic and a pragmatic approach to problem-solving. Her early years in Scotland shaped an international outlook that would later prove central to her career in global banking.

Education

Fraser pursued her undergraduate studies at Cambridge University in England, where she studied economics. She subsequently earned a Master of Business Administration (MBA) from Harvard Business School in the United States, a credential that positioned her for a career in management consulting and, later, in financial services. Her educational background at two of the world's most prominent academic institutions provided a foundation in both economic theory and business strategy.

Career

Early Career and McKinsey

Before entering the banking industry, Fraser worked at McKinsey & Company, the global management consulting firm. At McKinsey, she gained experience advising major corporations on strategy and operations, work that exposed her to a broad range of industries and business challenges. Her time in consulting helped develop the analytical and strategic skills that she would later apply in senior leadership roles within financial services.

Rise at Citigroup

Fraser joined Citigroup in 2004 and held a succession of increasingly senior roles over the next decade and a half. Her positions at the bank spanned multiple business units and geographies, giving her a comprehensive view of the institution's sprawling global operations. She served in leadership roles in Citi's strategy and mergers and acquisitions functions, and later took on responsibility for major business lines.

Among her prominent roles at Citigroup, Fraser served as CEO of Citi's Latin America division, where she oversaw the bank's operations across a complex and diverse region. She also served as president of Citigroup and CEO of the bank's Global Consumer Banking division, positions that placed her among the most senior executives at the firm and positioned her as a leading candidate to eventually take the top job.

Her ascent through the organization was marked by her involvement in several strategic initiatives, including efforts to streamline Citi's consumer banking operations and to exit markets where the bank lacked competitive scale. These experiences directly informed the strategic vision she would later articulate as CEO.

Appointment as CEO

In September 2020, Citigroup announced that Fraser would succeed Michael Corbat as CEO, effective February 2021. The appointment made her the first woman to lead any of the major Wall Street banks — a group that includes JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley, among others. The announcement was met with significant media coverage and was noted as a landmark moment for gender representation in the upper echelons of global finance.

Fraser took the helm of Citigroup at a challenging time for the institution. The bank had been subject to regulatory actions related to risk management and internal controls, and its stock price had lagged behind those of its major competitors for years. These challenges set the stage for the ambitious restructuring program that would come to define Fraser's tenure as CEO.

Restructuring and Transformation

Upon becoming CEO, Fraser embarked on what has been described as one of the most extensive organizational overhauls in Citigroup's recent history. The restructuring has involved multiple dimensions: simplifying the bank's organizational structure, divesting non-core consumer banking operations in several international markets, reducing headcount, and investing in technology and compliance infrastructure.

A central element of Fraser's strategy has been the decision to exit consumer banking markets in Asia and other regions where Citigroup's retail operations were not generating sufficient returns. By narrowing the bank's focus, Fraser sought to concentrate resources on areas where Citigroup possesses distinct competitive advantages, particularly in institutional banking, global transaction services, and cross-border financial flows.

In a conversation with McKinsey & Company published in February 2026, Fraser articulated her vision for Citigroup as a "human-centered global bank" that would harness emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and tokenization while continuing to invest in cross-border services — an area she identified as a core strength of the institution.

The restructuring has also involved substantial reductions in headcount. In January 2026, Bloomberg News reported that Citigroup was set to cut approximately 1,000 jobs in a single week as part of Fraser's ongoing effort to control costs and improve the bank's financial performance. These cuts were part of a broader pattern of workforce reductions that had been underway for several years under Fraser's leadership, reflecting her stated priority of running a leaner and more efficient organization.

"The Bar Is Raised" Memo

In January 2026, Fraser sent an internal memo to Citigroup's more than 200,000 employees titled "The bar is raised," which attracted widespread media attention. In the memo, Fraser set out higher performance expectations for the firm's workforce and signaled that further job cuts could follow. She wrote that the bank would no longer tolerate what she characterized as "old, bad habits" and emphasized that employees would be evaluated on results rather than effort alone.

The memo was reported on by multiple outlets. Fortune noted that Fraser told staff, "We are not graded on effort," and that the communication reflected her determination to accelerate the pace of the bank's cultural and operational transformation. Business Insider similarly reported that the memo emphasized that "old habits are out, and performance is in," underscoring Fraser's intent to change the firm's internal culture as part of the broader restructuring.

The memo and its public reception illustrated both the urgency Fraser brought to the transformation effort and the scrutiny that accompanied her decisions regarding workforce reductions.

Talent Recruitment and Leadership Team

As part of her restructuring effort, Fraser recruited a number of senior executives from outside Citigroup to help lead the bank's transformation. In January 2026, Business Insider reported on how Fraser's "star recruits" were helping Citigroup push ahead with its strategic agenda, as the CEO laid out expectations for the bank's performance in 2026 and beyond. The report indicated that Fraser credited the bank with having moved past what she described as the "dog days" of the early restructuring phase and was entering a period of more offensive strategic positioning.

The recruitment of new senior leaders was seen as a significant element of Fraser's strategy, reflecting her belief that fresh perspectives and external talent were necessary to drive the kind of change she envisioned for the institution.

AI and Workforce Training

A prominent theme of Fraser's leadership has been the integration of artificial intelligence into Citigroup's operations. In January 2026, Fortune reported that Fraser disclosed the company was training 175,000 of its employees to "reinvent themselves" in anticipation of AI-driven changes to their roles. Fraser acknowledged that AI was expected to eliminate certain desk jobs and emphasized that the bank was proactively preparing its workforce for this transition rather than waiting for the technology to displace workers without warning.

The scale of the training initiative — encompassing the majority of Citigroup's global workforce — was noted as one of the largest AI reskilling efforts in the banking sector. Fraser framed the initiative as part of a broader effort to ensure that Citigroup's employees could adapt to a rapidly changing technological landscape, positioning the bank to benefit from AI adoption while mitigating the disruption to individual workers.

In her conversation with McKinsey, Fraser further elaborated on her technology strategy, discussing the potential of tokenization — the use of blockchain-based digital tokens to represent traditional financial assets — alongside AI as transformative forces in global banking.

Compensation

Fraser's compensation as CEO of Citigroup has been a subject of public reporting. In February 2026, The Wall Street Journal reported that Fraser's total pay for 2025 had risen to $42 million, an increase of approximately $7.5 million over her 2024 compensation. The increase in pay was reported in the context of the bank's ongoing restructuring and the performance benchmarks set by Citigroup's board of directors. CEO compensation at major banks is closely watched by investors, regulators, and the public as an indicator of how boards assess executive performance relative to institutional results.

Personal Life

Jane Fraser holds both British and American citizenship. She has spoken publicly about the challenges of balancing a demanding career in finance with family responsibilities, a topic that has received attention given her position as the first woman to lead a major Wall Street bank. Fraser has been open about the fact that she took a career break earlier in her professional life to spend time with her family, a decision she has described in interviews as important to her personal well-being.

Fraser is known to reside in the United States. She has two children. Beyond these publicly documented facts, Fraser has generally maintained a degree of privacy regarding her personal and family life, consistent with the norms of many senior executives in the financial sector.

Recognition

Fraser's appointment as CEO of Citigroup in 2021 was itself a landmark event, making her the first woman to serve as chief executive of any of the major Wall Street banks. The appointment was covered extensively by global media and was noted by business commentators, gender equity advocates, and financial industry observers as a significant moment in the history of American finance.

She has been featured on multiple lists of influential business leaders. Her leadership during a period of extensive transformation at one of the world's largest banks has made her one of the most closely watched executives in the global financial industry.

Fraser's decision to implement one of the banking sector's largest AI reskilling programs, encompassing 175,000 employees, has also drawn attention as an example of proactive workforce management in the face of technological disruption.

Her public communications, including the widely reported "The bar is raised" memo of January 2026, have contributed to her profile as a CEO willing to articulate demanding expectations and to confront organizational inertia directly.

Legacy

As of early 2026, Fraser's legacy is still being shaped by the ongoing transformation of Citigroup. Her appointment as the first woman to lead a major Wall Street bank marked a milestone in an industry that has historically seen little gender diversity at the highest levels of leadership. Regardless of the ultimate financial outcomes of her restructuring program, the symbolic significance of her appointment has been noted as a development with lasting implications for the representation of women in finance.

Fraser's strategic decisions at Citigroup — including the exit from consumer banking in multiple international markets, the aggressive pursuit of cost reductions, and the large-scale investment in AI training — represent a distinct approach to modernizing a legacy financial institution. Her emphasis on cultural change, as reflected in her internal communications and public statements, has been a defining feature of her tenure.

The scale of Citigroup's AI reskilling initiative, covering 175,000 employees, has been cited as a potential model for how large organizations can prepare their workforces for technological disruption. Fraser's framing of this effort — encouraging employees to "reinvent themselves" before their roles are transformed — has contributed to broader conversations in the business world about the responsibilities of employers in the age of artificial intelligence.

Whether Fraser's restructuring ultimately delivers the improved financial performance and cultural transformation she has sought will be a central question in assessments of her leadership in the years ahead. As of 2026, the transformation remained in progress, with Fraser signaling that further changes — including additional job cuts and continued investment in technology — were forthcoming.