Mark Mason takes over the CFO role at a time of investor frustration with Citigroup’s lagging stock price, according to this memo. Its shares trade for about 1.2 times tangible book value compared with 2.1 times for shares of JPMorgan Chase & Co (JPM.N), the largest U.S. bank by assets.
The institutional clients group where Mason is now finance chief provides trading, lending, treasury and investment banking services to large companies. He is also responsible for submitting Citigroup’s capital plans to the U.S. Federal Reserve as part of its annual stress test, a process that determines how much money the bank can return to shareholders through dividends or stock buybacks.
In prior roles, Mason worked closely with Corbat to unload Citigroup’s troubled assets following the 2007-2009 financial crisis, and later ran the private bank that caters to ultra-wealthy individuals.
Mason grew up in Queens, New York, and lived in a house overlooking an expressway to John F. Kennedy International Airport, he said in a 2017 podcast interview with the president of Howard University, his alma mater.
He and his younger brother were raised by a single mother with help from family members who lived nearby. He went to public schools until attending Howard for his undergraduate degree, then getting an MBA from Harvard Business School.
“We didn’t have much, but we had a lot of family,” Mason said. “So, it was a good childhood, but it was one that was short of money in ways, so I learned very early on the importance of hard work and the correlation between that and achievement and money.”
