“Innovation” can sometimes feel like an overused buzzword favored by the likes of startups. But more and more, multinational companies are infusing their organizations with teams focused on looking ahead to solve the biggest problems facing their industries. But how do companies with offices around the world and a workforce that numbers in tens of thousands take a nimble approach and embrace a startup mindset?
On this episode of “Good Things Happen,” we’re joined by Emily Turner, Head of Business Development for the Citi Institutional Clients Group, and Arjun Viswanathan, Head of Data Science, Markets at Citi to get their perspective.
Emily and Arjun are forging new ground at Citi with their focus on innovation, looking for ways to simplify internal processes and make room for everyone to participate in the process and create the next genius idea. Listen in as they discuss the impact of their work and democratizing the “innovation” process.
The views expressed herein are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views of Citigroup Global Markets Inc. or its affiliates. All opinions are subject to change without notice. Neither the information provided nor any opinion expressed constitutes a solicitation for the purchase or sale of any security. The expressions of opinion are not intended to be a forecast of future events or a guarantee of future results.
Bio: Emily Turner, Head of Business Development, Institutional Clients Group, Citi
Emily Turner is the head of Business Development for Citi’s Institutional Clients Group (ICG). In this role, she is responsible for defining and articulating the ICG growth strategy; leading work with external partners to explore new opportunities for growth and to create new competitive advantages; driving ICG’s innovation efforts; and coordinating ICG’s existing venture capital investing activities. Emily and her team work closely with Citi’s Global Consumer Bank, Citi’s Corporate Strategy team, Citi’s Control Functions and Citi Ventures. Emily is a member of the ICG management team.
Previously, Emily was the head of Citi Ventures UK and co-led Citi’s internal growth engine, D10X. In this role, she spearheaded efforts to identify, validate and launch new growth opportunities across the ICG. Leveraging the principles of Corporate Entrepreneurship and Lean Startup, she focused on corporate innovation to solve for clients’ needs and was closely involved in the launches of CitiConnect® for Blockchain and ProxymitySM.
Emily joined Citi Ventures in 2016 from Citi’s Markets and Securities Services group, where she held multiple roles in Client Strategy, Client Management and Business Development.
Prior to Citi, Emily worked as a management consultant at McKinsey & Company in London and she has a depth of experience in financial services through her previous roles at Merrill Lynch, ABN Amro and UBS.
Bio: Arjun Viswanathan, Head of Data Science for Global Markets, Citi
Arjun’s mandate is to help Markets and ICG optimize ourselves via data and maths : to help us generate higher-quality and more revenue, understand and optimize our resource usage, and supercharge our teams with rigorous and intelligent tools.
A large part of his role is to work with internal partners to develop better platforms and algorithms for our biggest problems: in particular, working on our unified compute (XiP) and unified data (Olympus) fabrics. He enjoys his role at Citi – it comes with an incredibly diverse problem set and incredibly smart and fun colleagues.
Prior to this role, Arjun was the head of data science for Global Rates at Citi. He joined Citi in 2014, before which he was a portfolio manager at a macro hedge fund. Prior to that, he ran the vanilla rate option trading business at Morgan Stanley in London, before which he was a rate options trader at Lehman Brothers.
Arjun has degrees in computer science from Oxford and mathematics from the University of Delhi. In his spare time his hobby is competitive machine learning.
