Harold Butler, Citi's head of diversified financial institutions groupCiti
It's Friday. Well done Wall Streeters, you made it to the end of the… day before you open your laptops to work on Saturday.
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I'm your host, Aaron Weinman. To lighten things up, I'm rolling out Insider's first "Banker of the Week" segment. The BoW highlights rainmakers, significant new hires, or someone taking on meaningful initiatives at their firms.
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1. Our inaugural BoW: Harold Butler, who leads Citi's diverse financial institutions group. After 17 years at Citi, he's known for his links to the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve.
Butler — a huge advocate for greater equity on Wall Street — was tasked with leading Citi's newly-formed diverse financial institutions group in February. The team aims to expand Citi's capital-markets activity with minority-owned broker dealers and asset managers, and it oversees the bank's investments in minority-owned depository institutions (MDIs).
A couple of years before being asked to lead this team, however, Butler sowed the seeds for a rotational program designed to cultivate links between Citi and more MDIs. In the summer of 2020, while having dinner with Kase Lawal, chairman at Unity Bank in Texas, the Lone Star state's sole Black-owned bank, Butler was asked whether Citi would consider a grant to help Unity get a new markets tax-credit business.
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Butler thought on it and realized a rotational program not only strengthened relationships with MDIs, but provided minority-owned financial institutions with access to Wall Street talent, services, and technology.
The rotational initiative, like a secondment, embeds Citi bankers with MDIs for a short term.
Thanks in part to Butler, Citi started the rotational program last year. Its initial secondee was Gina Nisbeth, a director in Citi's trading division, who spent last year working with Unity National Bank of Houston.
And last month, Citi named three secondees for the second installment of rotations:
Sandy Furlow is doing a year-long assignment with African-American-owned Industrial Bank.
Abhijit Bhattacharya is providing advisory services to Optus Bank.
Valerie Scruggs joined M&F Bank, where she will work in advisory services.
3. Despite Citadel's hiring chops, not all of it seems squeaky clean. A former analyst at the firm was sentenced to prison time for scamming millions of dollars in Covid relief loans, according to Bloomberg.
6. Franchise Group is eyeing more than $2 billion to support its $8 billion deal for retailer Kohl's. The store operator is turning to Apollo Global Management for the money, people told the New York Post. Meanwhile, Apollo also teamed up with Indian conglomerate Reliance to make a binding offer for UK-based drug store Walgreens Boots, Bloomberg reports.
7. Citigroup suffered a payments tech glitch at the height of market stress in March 2020. As per the Financial Times, the glitch — which meant Citi was late to meet a margin call — left the bank relying on the grace of an exchange clearing house to prevent it defaulting on margin payments for derivatives contracts.
CIFC Asset Management, an alt-credit specialist with about $4o billion in AUM, has hired Conor Daly as its head of European credit. He previously ran European credit for fellow structured-finance shop Onex Credit.
Event invite: The fourth installment in Insider's "Financing a Sustainable Future" series is next Tuesday, June 14 at noon Eastern. This event, in partnership with Bank of America, focuses on corporate governance, perhaps the most difficult measure of ESG reporting. Check out the previous three events and register for next week here.
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