Citi Personal Wealth Management is a runaway train heading in the wrong direction with no conductor - disaster is imminent. In the CSA role, I was told I would be a "sales assistant." The interviewers made it sound similar to the responsibilities of an Internal Wholesaler for insurance carriers I.E. talking to potential clients on the phone, creating proposals, sending out marketing material, ETC... WRONG. In reality, CSA's are responsible for maneuvering Citi's endless interdepartmental bureaucracy on behalf of financial advisors. It is 100 percent an administrative role. You will be a workhorse to complete administrative tasks for up to 4 financial advisors that you may or may not ever meet in person. You won't have a clue how to do anything. Your middle-level manager may or may not ever learn your name. You will be dependent on a severely underqualified and understaffed Field Services team to support you. At this point, I rarely call them because 90 percent of the time they are wrong or don't follow through on the requested task at hand. Speaking of unhelpful departments, Supervisory (OSJ and RSO) completely run the show at Citi and I strongly believe their entire function is to turn business away at any and all cost. They make even the most basic task, such as a wire transfer or account maintenance, feel like you're running an uphill marathon. They are zero help. For example, say you're missing something in a complex account corporate account opening, instead of pointing out what you are missing - they will leave a note that says "call field services." Out of spite, I call them directly. Speaking of automation, there is absolutely zero at Citi. All reviews are done manually. Further - there's no kind of notification system for when a review is complete. You have to manually check everything. What year is it again? The technology in general is about 25 years behind our competitors. We use four different CRM systems that don't communicate with each other. They are all clunky and are about as user-friendly as a broken computer. Get used to frequent software crashes because Citi only pays for the minimal amount of bandwidth to keep servers operational. The most disheartening thing to me is that every employee, management included, is well aware of this laundry list of problems, and they just accept it. "Welcome to Citi," they say.
