Citi to hire 400 U.S. advisors and launch Citi Sky AI

Citi announced plans to hire more than 400 U.S. client advisors and personal bankers and to introduce an AI wealth assistant called Citi Sky for Citigold customers this summer. The bank said U.S. retail customers hold about $3 trillion at other institutions and that globally clients keep roughly $5 trillion outside Citi.

Andy Sieg, head of Citi Wealth, laid out the hiring and technology plans at the bank’s investor day in New York. The new advisors will be placed in U.S. branches and in the Citigold unit for clients with higher balances. Citi currently has about 2,300 advisors worldwide and aims to use the hires to deepen relationships and increase investment conversations with existing customers. “We’re elevating service quality and expanding client coverage. We’ll add over 400 client advisors and personal bankers,” Sieg told investors.

Citi Sky is built using Google’s Gemini models and cloud services and will be offered to Citigold clients with at least $200,000 in investable assets. In a demonstration, the virtual assistant highlighted events such as a maturing certificate of deposit, flagged potential mortgage-refinancing opportunities after a simulated Federal Reserve rate cut, and then asked whether the client wanted to review options or schedule an appointment with a human advisor. Sieg described the assistant as “a force multiplier for our advisors,” saying it can answer financial questions outside bank hours and free human advisors to focus on more-complex planning.

Beyond the U.S. retail hires, Citi plans to add about 100 staff to its global private bank, which currently includes roughly 400 bankers and 200 investment counselors. The private bank serves wealthy international families and reported average client investable assets of about $400 million. In the U.S., Citi operates roughly 650 branches concentrated around New York, Miami, San Francisco, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles, and plans to place advisors in about 75% of its identified high-opportunity branches.

Citi also plans investments in branch refreshes, next-generation teller and workstation technology, and upgrades to online banking and investment platforms. The bank said it will hire 200 small-business advisors to expand coverage for commercial clients.

Citi’s wealth unit reported $1.3 trillion in total client balances. The division recorded about $90 billion in net new flows over the past two years, with roughly $13 billion of 2025 inflows coming from referrals across Citi’s banking and other units. Wealth revenue rose about 16% last year to $11.3 billion. Average investment revenue per advisor rose from $861,000 in 2022 to nearly $1.4 million last year, and the unit’s efficiency ratio improved to 84% from 95% in 2022 after a roughly 20% reduction in staff and a refocus away from trust and proprietary asset-management businesses.

Citi CEO Jane Fraser, who hired Sieg from another firm in 2023 as part of a broader overhaul, said the bank expects to grow assets organically by investing in advisors’ data and technology. “We will steadily scale by continuing to invest in advisors’ data and technology, including AI to improve productivity and client outcomes,” Fraser said at the investor event.

Sieg acknowledged the wealth unit is not yet at its target scale. He said the group has made progress but still has work to do to increase the share of clients’ assets managed by Citi. His tenure has included internal and legal scrutiny: Citi retained outside counsel to review alleged instances of misbehavior, and the bank faces a lawsuit from a former executive alleging sex and racial discrimination and harassment. Citi has called those claims baseless. The legal matters were not a focus of the investor-day presentation, which centered on hiring, technology and client retention plans.