By Tatiana Bautzer
NEW YORK (Reuters) -Citigroup expects a 25% to 30% rise in investment banking fees in the fourth quarter from a year earlier, while market revenue will grow by a “high-teens” percentage, Chief Financial Officer Mark Mason said on Tuesday.
Mason also said he expects the bank to be on the high end of revenue guidance for 2024 when it announces its fourth-quarter and full-year results on Jan. 15. Citigroup’s profit already benefited in the third quarter from higher investment banking activity, propped up by debt underwriting.
“The global economy has proven to be quite resilient,” Mason said at the Goldman Sachs Financial Services Conference in New York.
The United States is particularly strong and resilient, both considering consumer and corporate clients, he said.
Talking about clients of Citi’s branded cards, Mason said, “Between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday, spending was up in the mid single digits” over the previous year.
China’s economy is also showing signs of stabilization and starting to rebound, he said.
Asked about the need to improve data quality and governance to comply with regulators’ consent orders, Mason said the problems are mostly related to regulatory reporting and not to clients’ or financial reporting data. He said the bank is investing to fix the issues and has changed a previous product-driven approach to data to reporting driven.
(Reporting by Tatiana Bautzer and Saeed Azhar; Edditing by Lananh Nguyen, Susan Fenton and Mark Porter)
