Pandit ropes in Travelocity ex-CEO for Citi of the future

NEW YORK: Citigroup chief executive officer Vikram Pandit may be the Marty McFly of banking. Executives at Citigroup���s US retail-banking unit have huddled for seven months to conceive a ���bank of the future��� offering rejuvenated internet and cell-phone portals alongside branches, people familiar with the matter said. Citigroup hired 37-year-old Michelle Peluso, who helped modernise airline reservations as CEO of Travelocity.com, to lead the sessions.

Like McFly, the character played by Michael J Fox in the movie ���Back to the Future,��� Citigroup is reaching to the past to reinvent itself. In 1997, under then-CEO John Reed, the bank unveiled a short-lived plan to do away with branches wherever possible by pushing more customers to personal computers, telephones and automated teller machines, a technology that Reed helped proliferate. Pandit, unlike Reed, doesn���t plan to get rid of branches.

Bankers have long assumed that ���people who like online banking have no money, and people with money don���t like online banking,��� said Seamus McMahon, a former regional president for HSBC Holdings��� US banking unit. Now, ���there is a group of people who were in their 20s and are now in their 30s, and actually have some money.���

Citigroup, which got a $45 billion federal bailout last year, is trying to swell US deposits prized as a source of funding amid the global credit crunch. Wells Fargo and Bank of America have more than 6,000 domestic branches each, compared with Citigroup���s 1,001, and at least three times Citigroup���s US retail deposits. Pandit tried to bolster deposits last year by buying the failing bank Wachovia, only to have the bid trumped by San Francisco-based Wells Fargo. As of June 30, Citigroup had $135.7 billion of retail-banking deposits in the US and Canada.

���They don���t have nearly the branch presence in the United States as their competitors,��� said Edward Najarian, an analyst at institutional brokerage International Strategy & Investment Group in New York. ���So they have to come up with something innovative.���