Morning Coffee: Citi's top woman in the UK confesses a high-pressure childhood. Deutsche Bank has been doing away with MDs in London

Tiina Lee, the head of Citi in the UK, has a stressful job. Lee is designated the "chief executive" of Citigroup global markets in the UK for regulatory purposes. As such, Lee is responsible for the whole of Citigroup's investment bank in the UK. She's paid well for this: regulatory filings show that she and three other senior managers in Citi's UK business earned $3m each last year. That's a lot, but maybe not considering the size of the burden: if Citi's London business engages in nefarious activities and Lee doesn't stop it, she could face unlimited personal fines, or even years of imprisonment.

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Lee seems ok with this. She held a similar position at Deutsche Bank's UK business before she inflicted the Citi role upon herself in January 2024. This might be because, as Lee explained to the Times at the weekend, she was groomed for pressure.

As the only child of two immigrant parents to the UK, Lee said she was the object of her parents' vicarious ambition. They weren't wealthy and lived in a very small flat in North London, but spent all their money sending Lee to fee-paying South Hampstead High School, where the other pupils mostly inhabited "beautiful homes." It was "very aspirational" says Lee, who had a Saturday job in a local card shop.

Lee's mother was a secretary at a stockbroking firm. She encouraged Lee into the city, where Lee became a trader before assuming the weighty mantle of 'most highly regulated employee.' She's married to a man who was once tipped to become head of the BBC, and has a teenage daughter she drives about in an Audi SUV. 

Lee has something of firing and hiring reputation and reports indirectly to Vis Raghavan whose propensity for hiring (from JPMorgan) is without compare. Alongside her other responsibilities, Lee is also overseeing the construction of Citi's new Canary Wharf office, which will have a three-storey winter garden and a floor devoted to "wellness." When it's finished, Lee says Citi's London people won't be in the new office all the time, but they will be there sufficiently often to "learn the right behaviours”. 

Lee operates "tea with Tiina" sessions with groups of UK employees to help get a feel for what's going on. In this way, Lee helps keep Citi on the regulatory straight and narrow. Her parents must be proud of her. Hopefully, the regulator will always remain so, too.

Separately, Deutsche Bank has finally been jettisoning some managing directors (MDs) in London. 

As we have observed here for years, Deutsche Bank's structure is less pyramidal and more conical due to its surfeit of senior people. "There are teams in London with five managing directors and two associates," one Deutsche Bank junior told us in May, complaining that this leads to overwork as the MDs each seek to prove themselves. 

Now, Deutsche may be pruning some of these people. Financial News observes that Deutsche's UK business dropped 22 MDs last year, which was the first time it cut its biggest dogs for four years. It's not clear who they were, but maybe Deutsche's juniors won't have five bosses telling them what to do from now on.

Meanwhile...

HSBC has a new global security strategy", under which it will have 4x as many security cameras at its new London office and biometric verification involving employees' mobile phones. Employees do not seem keen. (Reuters) 

JPMorgan is considering building a whole new tower for itself in London, either at the Riverside plot it acquired in Canary Wharf in 2008, or in the City. Refurbishing its existing office might not be worth it. (Financial Times) 

Current and former OpenAI employees plan to sell approximately $6bn worth of shares to an investor group so that they can cash out and remain employed instead of moving to Meta for $100m. (Bloomberg) 

A 32-year-old golf coach was burned by the Dubai work ethic and now lives in Bournemouth. "I was coming home to my partner after 12 hour days, at 9pm, and I could barely hold a conversation because I'd be so tired." (Bournemouth Echo) 

Goldman Sachs will sell you a stake in Millennium Management for $1m. (Bloomberg) 

Quiet cracking is when workers "show up, they do their job, but they struggle in silence while they do it. What we've seen in the market more recently is that a lot of folks are actually staying with their current employers, but they're not actually thriving at work." (Business Insider) 

"Assholes are people who think the normal rules of civil society don’t apply to them. They’re people who think their needs and wants are all that matter and don’t give a rat’s ass about other people’s needs or wants. They’re people who use bullying and intimidation to get what they want. They’re people who look for reasons to not get along with people and undermine them, because they believe that is the best way to get ahead. They’re people who view everyone on earth as a tool they can use to get ahead." (Substack) 

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