Citi Fintech Chief Bails on Bank After Only 10 Months on the Job

Heather Cox was named head of Citi Fintech in October 2015.  After less than a year of attempting to guide one of the largest banks in the world through the Fintech revolution, it appears that Cox has had enough and has moved on to USAA.

Stephen Bird, Citi’s head of Consumer Banking, was quoted in WSJ.com, saying;

“[Heather had] embraced our vision to become a true mobile business, championed working in new ways to improve speed to market and pursued every avenue to make the experience we deliver simpler, better and faster.”

Cox’s new position will be as USAA’s Chief Tech and Digital Officer. She will be reporting directly to Stuart Parker, CEO of USAA.  Parker released a statement on the new hire;

“Heather’s appointment reinforces our service commitment in fast-moving areas like digital, technology and user experience. She’s the right leader to take us where we’re going.”

The Citi Fintech unit, which numbered about 75 employees – far bigger than most Fintech startups – was setup to create a smartphone-centric experience for the millions of customers.

At the time of creation last fall, Bird described the new entity as “conceived of and built without silos from the start, [Citi FinTech] will be extremely lean with a flat organizational structure and an agile operating model.”

One of the struggles for traditional financial firms is to create an entity that disrupts existing operations. I wonder if the structure that was predicted to be “eventually emulated across the global consumer bank” got mired in its own legacy operations.