In 2022, as junior investment bankers complained of burnout from a record-breaking dealmaking boom, Citigroup had a solution for bringing in and retaining new talent: a better work life balance working in Spain’s Costa del Sol.
The US bank hired 27 analysts to work from a newly opened office in Málaga — a city favoured by tourists and Spaniards alike for its cocktail of sun, sea, restaurants and bars — promising eight-hour days and free weekends.
Citi’s rivals labelled it a publicity stunt that would do little to change the culture on Wall Street. But Manolo Falcó, then the bank’s global co-head of investment banking, insisted “this is not a gimmick”.
Less than three years later, the office is closed and most staff moved to London. A handful of employees have been let go as the sun sets on an initiative designed to break from the traditional working conditions faced by the junior analysts who do much of the grunt work in investment banking.
Former employees who worked in Citi’s Málaga office, as well as those involved in the project, say the reality differed to the bank’s pitch, with many working long hours in the hopes of earning coveted roles in cities such as London and Paris.
“That flexibility that was marketed as the core of the offering there wasn’t really respected,” said one former employee based in Málaga. “If you want to succeed and be moved to London you couldn’t do that without doing the same working hours as people there.”
The project was conceived by a trio of Citi executives: Nacho Gutiérrez-Orrantia, who was then Citi’s Emea head of investment banking and capital markets; María Díaz del Río, chief of staff for that business; and Falcó.
The team looked across different countries, including Portugal, Poland and the Czech Republic, but landed on Spain — encouraged by the mayor of Málaga’s business friendly approach.
Each of the analysts hired from pool of more than 3,000 applicants was allocated to one of the industry teams in London. If they performed well at the end of a two-year period, Málaga could be a springboard to a job in the City.
The process was largely managed by del Río, who helped assign the junior bankers to different teams, and a senior manager was on the ground to manage shifts so that analysts did not work long hours.
But former employees say the promise of a job in London, where they could be at the heart of the action, made them feel they had to work longer hours in order to stand out from their peers.
“A lot of the employees in Málaga were miserable,” said one person familiar with the initiative. “There were lots of promises but little progression.”
Citi said that its “emphasis on fostering colleague mobility efforts and integrating our hubs” was “evident in the successful applications by many of our colleagues from Málaga for positions in our London and Paris hubs”. The bank has not specified how many of the Málaga employees were moved to other locations.
Junior analysts in Spain say they had more flexibility, but for those who wanted to move on it was a case of working the same hours as their London counterparts while earning half the salary.
Citi analysts in Málaga said they were offered a starting salary of $55,000 while peers in major financial centres such as London and New York make upwards of $100,000.
“It’s very subjective on what work you were doing,” said one employee. “The more you were willing to commit to the cause, the more projects you got.”
If Málaga employees were not willing to make themselves available until the early hours of the morning, they may not get allocated the more demanding mandates and that could scupper their chances of moving, they added.
Banks have been grappling with how to attract and retain talent, particularly during the dealmaking boom that followed the pandemic slump when junior employees complained of burnout and 100-hour work weeks.
Junior bankers at Goldman Sachs described “inhumane conditions” in a presentation deck that triggered a flurry of new initiatives, some of which included at least one weekend day off work or a limit to the amount of hours employees could log.
But a better work-life balance among junior employees stands at odds with the demands of investment banking where hours logged and hard work are often the currency to earning a promotion.
One Citi employee in Málaga who moved to London called the culture inside the office “truly special” because it had brought together young people from different nationalities who were eager to do well.
“I’ll probably never get to work in an atmosphere like [the] one that I got there” again, the person said.
But the downside of a new initiative staffed with eager 20-somethings — launched shortly before chief executive Jane Fraser kicked off a huge restructuring of the bank — was a lack of oversight from distracted Citi managers.
Del Río’s departure as part of the restructuring in 2024 meant there was no one to oversee the group and employees in Málaga felt forgotten about. “It had its cons, not having your seniors there,” a former employee said.
When the office first opened in the summer of 2022, there was an office manager overseeing the analyst class who stayed for almost a year, they said. Afterwards, there was a revolving door of senior people who came in and out of the office and there was a long stretch where there was no senior presence at all.
“We had a six-month span where we were completely forgotten,” said the former employee.
“When there was no manager it was pure anarchy, there were people that you wouldn’t see for months, the morale was so low,” they added. There was poor attendance in the office as it became increasingly clear that Citi was likely to close it down and some employees who left for other jobs were not replaced.
Citi said in a statement last week that the decision to close down the office was part of its strategy to “simplify the firm and make improvements to how we operate”.
Those involved say the Málaga office was a casualty of Project Bora Bora, the internal code name used for Citi’s major restructuring. With del Río no longer at the bank and both Falcó and Gutiérrez-Orrantia in different roles, there was no one to support the cause.
“People lost focus because of [the restructuring] and without that force pushing it forward, who is backing this?” said another person involved with the programme. “The concept was good, it was poor execution.”
For many of the analysts based in Málaga, the sunshine coast was a stop-gap to a better job in London. But for those who were hoping investment banking could offer something different, Citi’s proposition only put a plaster on a major issue.
One of the employees said: “They sold us the dream but the reality was much more different”.
