Brady motors off after putting Citi on the road to success

Going to see a senior executive who is retiring is always different from meeting one still in the job. The atmosphere is more relaxed. There is no fidgeting and looking at the watch – a subliminal message that the interviewer’s time is up – and no personal assistant gently knocking on the door to say there is an urgent call to talk.

Aidan Brady, after 30-plus years in Citibank – now called Citi – with more than 20 in the chief executive officer’s hot seat, has had plenty of that. Whatever he does next, he says that he “would certainly not take up another executive position”.

As he leaves the bank, which now employs 2,500 people in Dublin, Brady says he will take a few months to decide what to do next. He may consider directorships or some non-executive involvement in new businesses in areas such as technology. But first he is heading to Spain on a Ducati motorbike, from where he will gradually tour back to Ireland. “It’s a great feeling, you get to see everything,” he says.

But it will be a big change. After years of running hard in a senior corporate role, Brady admits that the adjustment will take a bit of time. “Last week it hit me for the first time. Gosh. What am I going to do now? I will be occupied with all sorts of things but it’s different. It’s not I have to do this by tomorrow, I have to prepare for this. After 40 years, you get used to that.”

Time for a breather

So Brady is going to “take a breather” and will finally have time for a bit more golf and a few more visits to watch his beloved Liverpool. After that, he said he has “lots of friends and young people doing interesting things in business, in technology”.

He will consider where to get involved, and where he might have a role in the area he most enjoys – “ customer deals, that was the most exciting”. The huge burden of regulatory compliance now faced by banks is something he will not miss, however. With Citi’s Dublin operation now coming under the control of the European Central Bank, and a fiesta of box-ticking and compliance to be faced, Brady says he is “ glad to leave that to the next guy”.

Brady has overseen strong growth in Citi, now a big employer specialising in what is called “transactions” banking. This is not the glamorous world of investment banking, deals and trading, but rather the provision of platforms and services to big companies to allow them to pay bills, trade and do business across the world. The development of these products out of the Irish branch has meant Citi has earned significant profits in Ireland – close to $800 per annum in recent years.

In turn, the capital built up from years of generated profits has been used to expand Citi’s Irish operation – Citibank Europe plc. In the mid-1990s, the Irish operation became the legal entity for the bank’s branches in central Europe. Then at the start of this year it also became the controlling legal entity for the bank’s operations across western Europe. The bank was regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland – which allowed it to “passport” services into other markets. Now it has just come under control of the Single Supervisory Mechanism, the ECB’s supervisory arm, which took over responsibility for control of big banks at the start of this year.

Brady feels the vote of confidence by Citi – to make Dublin the legal entity for the bank’s European operations as part of its latest restructuring – is a good note for him to finish on.It means the Irish bank is now the legal entity controlling 21 European operations with 9,000 employees and a $50 billion balance sheet.

Citi has had its ups and down since it established in 1965 in Ireland, following the first wave of US multinationals – its clients – who were starting to open branches here. Brady started life as an accountant with Stoke Kennedy Crowley – now KPMG – and later moved to ICC, the state-owned bank which acted as a training ground for many bankers, financiers and stockbrokers. It was dubbed the “Induction Course for Citibank”, Brady jokes, with a number moving from there to the US-owned operation. Brady joined as a relationship manager – dealing with big clients – but soon moved to a new treasury operation.

Citi hired a high-profile markets team. “We were going to be masters of the universe,” Brady says. “We were going to be an investment bank and compete with the big centres.” It was the first job he really enjoyed. But it ended in tears when a trader in the bank ran up major losses on the equity market in 1987. The losses and other made by traders in other banks during that catastrophic year for the markets, led to a major pullback of investment banking and trading by US banks to their home market. The writing was on the wall for Dublin.

“We had to really recalibrate the whole place,” Brady says. He became treasurer of the bank – in 1989 it moved from Stephen’s Green to the International Financial Services Centre with less than 100 people, half its original size. “A lot of people lost their jobs. It was a big wrench,” says Brady. The experience clearly affected his strategy as the bank grew. Investment banking and the London trading culture was not going to be part of the bank’s future. Instead it was to be based on more solid, reliable revenues, without the spectacular rises and falls of the investment banking world.

Focused minds

“The move to the IFSC was a reinvention, too,” he says, raising the question of where the bank would head in the future. It had its base of US clients here and some large Irish corporate clients. But with this market in its pocket, there was little scope for growth in the Irish market. The move to the docklands “focused minds on looking outside the country”.

The bank started to move into customer services and, in the mid-1990s got its big break. Citibank was looking to centralise back-office operations for central Europe, involving areas such as payments processing and custody – the area now called transaction services. “We won that deal,” says Brady. “We had to build up overnight, hiring 1,000 people in short order.

“ It was big news at the time, but there was nothing similar to it in here, so we were starting from scratch.”

It was to be a learning curve. The roles were operations-based and not entirely suited to graduate intake. There was tough competition for talent. There were two or three years of “high turnover and finding the right skills, but then it settled down”.

The new operation was up and running, but Brady says he realised that being a “cost centre” – performing operations functions for other parts of the group – was not going to be the way forward. Inevitably, sooner or later, Ireland would be priced out of the market by a cheaper player. Also, the relatively low corporate tax rate meant Ireland was a good place for a multinational bank to make profit, rather than incur cost. And the kind of transactions products which Citi could develop – earning sold, reliable revenues – - would garner steady profit.

Citi changed tack. It got an Irish banking licence in 2001. In 2002, a payments products allowing big multinationals to pay bills across the world was moved to Ireland. Another 16 or so products followed, leading to a significant growth in employment and profits. Employment rose quickly and, Brady says, Citibank in Ireland was in a “classic multinational lifecycle” – moving from more basic functions to those with more value.

The profits being earned – and the cash left in the Irish branch’s balance sheet – led to the expansion into central Europe. It also led Brady to launch an initiative to get the bank to invest in developing products in Ireland. In 2004, it went to the IDA with a plan to set up a research and development lab. The initial response from the IDA was puzzlement – R&D was more associated with big computer manufacturers than banks. But, by 2006, a deal was done and Brady launched his innovation laboratory in Dublin, still a central focus on the Dublin operation.

“We announced 100 jobs. A bright journalist asked me what are you going to do in this lab? I struggled to articulate what could actually happen.” Brady said. He was a banker, not a tech head, but saw the potential of the key role of development in financial products, requiring the highest level of safety, regulation, anti-money laundering and so on.

It was a hard sell at a time when banking was not popular. The then IDA chief, Barry O’Leary, went on radio the next morning to be asked: “Isn’t another 100 bankers the last thing that Ireland needs?” Brady says he was glad he didn’t go on himself. “I would have been fit to be tied.”

Citi built its product-development capability in Dublin and survived the banking downturn, since benefiting from the subsequent consolidation of Citi’s operations in Europe. It now has a strong base here, Brady says, pays some €140 million a year to the exchequer and should be set for further growth, based on higher-skilled services.

However he acknowledges that the financial services industry overall is “not in great shape”. US banks have already done a lot of repositioning, he says, “but we would have hoped that the global economy would have shifted up a gear”, leading to the normal cyclical rise in inflation and interest rates. “Banks find it hard to make profits with interest rates at zero. It’s a tough place to be.”

Meanwhile the amount of capital which banks must hold has increased significantly. The pressure will remain on the industry to keep trimming costs. Brady is also optimistic about the future of the international financial services sector here. “I’ve been banging on about this for years,” he says cheerfully. Market- based operations are not the way forward for Ireland, he said, but the industry here can make progress in areas such as funds, payments, transactions, “fintech” – the application of technology to finances – and specialised areas like aviation finance.

“ For a good few years, I couldn’t understand why others weren’t doing what we were doing,” he says. Now it is starting to move again after the crisis years, with big investments by the likes of Credit Suisse and Accenture.

Employment growth

Brady believes the 38,000 employed in international financial services “can easily become 58,000”. And the jobs are well-paid, averaging some €65,000 a year.

There are limiting factors. Part of the game will be to attract staff back from overseas. “They are not going to come home to face a tax rate of 50 per cent plus. They just won’t. They can’t afford to.” The other limiting factor is housing, he says.

He also warns that stability will remain key. “There is so much uncertainty in the world, there is no visibility of where it will end . . . Growth will be hard to get, you’ve got the threat of Brexit, the US election, the whole nine yards out there. We are in a different phase here. We don’t want to mess that up.” He hopes the election will be quickly followed by the formation of a government with a focus on developing business.

Leaving the office to attend a farewell function to introduce his successor, Zdenek Turek, to customers, Brady is greeted by passing staff. "It's a vision," jokes one. Even after more than 20 years as boss, when you're gone, you're gone. On a motorbike somewhere in Europe, Brady will be getting used to the peace. CV Name: Aidan Brady

Age: 61 Family: Married to Liz, they have two children Interests: Motorbiking, football (a lifelong Liverpool fan), golf (“but I’m not big into it”) and travel. Something you might expect: He is adamant he doesn’t want another executive role (“I’m too long in the tooth for that!”). But after a few months off, he will look at opportunities for non-executive involvement. He wants to leave time for “things you never have time for” in a full-time senior executive job.

Something that might surprise: He is a “biker” with a number of different machines and will go travelling in Europe on a Ducati after stepping down.

Name: Aidan Brady

Age: 61 Family: Married to Liz, they have two children Interests: Motorbiking, football (a lifelong Liverpool fan), golf (“but I’m not big into it”) and travel. Something you might expect: He is adamant he doesn’t want another executive role (“I’m too long in the tooth for that!”). But after a few months off, he will look at opportunities for non-executive involvement. He wants to leave time for “things you never have time for” in a full-time senior executive job.

Something that might surprise: He is a “biker” with a number of different machines and will go travelling in Europe on a Ducati after stepping down.