Mens et manus: Leading figure from Citi discusses being open in ‘mind and hand’ in business

Naveed Sultan speaks at Imperial College Business School

By Tanya Gubbay 
Wednesday 6 June 2012

With reported revenues of $7.7bn in 2011, Treasury and Trade Solutions is one of the large global businesses within Citi. This week, their CEO, Naveed Sultan is speaking at Imperial College Business School as part of its Distinguished Guest Lecture series.

With over 25 years of banking experience, Naveed has been at Citi for over 18 years. He is currently responsible for a client base that includes 94% of the top 500 companies in the world, including public sector organisations, corporates and financial institutions.

Tanya Gubbay caught up with him ahead of his talk:

What would you highlight as the best part of your job?

Delivering world class solutions to our clients is an honour and inspires me to get up in the morning. On top of that, the opportunity to do this with a seasoned and passionate senior management team is also a tremendous privilege. The team's drive, expertise, diversity and team spirit has given me much inspiration.

This year is Citi’s 200th anniversary on 16 June 2012, and the company’s long history of innovation and global reach has helped attract many high profile clients as well as the best talent in the industry to work here.

What is the most challenging?

Given the scale of our business and global presence, it is hard work to continuously deliver innovation that is relevant commercially to our clients. We have a three year transformation programme currently in place to help us execute this in a systemic way.

We also want to manage our business so that it is more proactive and responsive to continued regulatory changes. For example, in a digital environment, the standards for anti money laundering are high, and we need to continue to stay very focused on this.

You engage regularly with students, by teaching business at the University of Punjab and lecturing here at Imperial and at the University of Oxford. How important do you think it is for business and academia to link up?

We are always looking outside to bring great ideas in, and academia is one of the most important places where great ideas are being developed and tested. I studied at MIT in Boston and we were educated to be ‘open in mind and hand’ (mens et manus being the MIT motto). In our business, we also want to do this.

Naveed studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston

Learning from academia, which is at the forefront of cutting edge research with the brightest minds, is critical. We also believe in bringing the practical aspects and business insights to academia so that the research is more effective in driving successful commercialisation of ideas. The two-way dialogue is vital to both sides.

In what ways has the financial crisis changed how companies operate?

Whether it’s counterparty, credit or operational risk, the crisis has proved that we need to continuously assess our risk management systems. We are working on improving areas of our risk framework so that it can provide early identification, warning, and mitigation across our entire business.

The financial services industry is at the early stages of rebasing its cost structure to generate appropriate returns. This requires building new skill sets, looking differently at our processes and business model and changing how we operate. The owner/operator model that we are adopting here at Citi is critical in supporting this transformation.

There is a Chinese saying that crisis and opportunity go hand in hand. While the financial crisis has created many operational and business model challenges, it has also given us a tremendous opportunity to adapt and strengthen our business to drive greater value for clients.

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Registration is still open for Naveed Sultan's Distinguished Guest Lecture on Thursday 7 June at 6.30pm. More information is available from here