The Man Tasked With Ending Citigroup's Fat-Finger Blunders

For the past year, Tim Ryan has been untangling legacy software and data systems at the bank

- Bloomberg

Just before Citigroup Inc.'s tech chief faced his first global town hall meeting, he got some pointed advice from his teenager: Make sure the technology works.

That hasn't always been a given at Citigroup.

For the past year, Tim Ryan—an earnest, soft-spoken Bostonian who was once told in high school he'd never amount to much—has been untangling legacy software and data systems that have irked the bank's moneymakers and regulators, and have at times made it an industry punchline. The most notorious moments: "fat-finger" errors that accidentally credited fortunes to recipients.

Now, his division has made enough progress that it recently invited the bank's global workforce to a first-of-its-kind update on what's done and what's to come. The town hall—with the energy of a Silicon Valley product launch—opened to thumping music and a montage video with a cybernetic take on Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam, before Ryan walked on stage in jeans and white sneakers. Chief executive officer (CEO) Jane Fraser soon followed, urging tech staffers to keep going—"crushing the competition."

It was a striking performance for a company once known for underinvesting in software and data management, resulting in a patchwork of legacy systems that prompted bank examiners to demand an overhaul and impose penalties.

"I came in with my eyes wide open, in terms of where we were and what needed to be done," Ryan later said in an interview.

He commands one of Citigroup's biggest armies of staff and oversees a budget that reflects the bank's more urgent focus on tech. It spent just over $9 billion, or almost a fifth of total operating expenses last year, on technology and communications—a larger proportion than its main competitors—according to regulatory filings.

The alternative, putting off upgrades, has proved costly in other ways.