When Citigroup emerged from its massive crisis (2007-08), there wasn’t much discussion around customer loyalty or customer engagement. What Citigroup CEO Mike Corbat has learned in the past year, though, indicates the need to re-engage with customers.
Corbat, who participated in a Q&A session on Tuesday at the Goldman Sachs 2014 U.S. Financial Services Conference, wants to simplify the customer experience at Citigroup.
“We continue to see a healing consumer around the world, but the world remains an uneven place,” Corbat said during the conference. “We knew coming out of the crisis that we first had to re-engage the consumer, quantitative easing, low mortgage rates, refinancing, all those things did that. About 
nine, 10 months ago, there was a very important transition and I saw it in my conversations with CEOs in the U.S.−real re-engagement. But through the crisis what we saw is companies very tightly managing expanses, because they knew top line was going to be difficult, deferring CapEx, deferring other types of investments, managing shareholders through buyback and other forms of financial engineering.”
About 10 or 11 months ago, though, Corbat saw a change of mindset.
“And that change of mindset, I think, was driven from a couple of things,” he said. “One is investors who are giving companies feedback. We’ve invested in your company, we want to see the top line growth, and it’s OK to go do that. And so we first saw a freeing up or a reinvestment in terms of some hiring, but in particular investment into CapEx. And then, interestingly, what happened is we saw companies start to push on the edges of being acquisitive and we saw the markets react well. And typically, what we’ve seen historically is companies go out and announce an acquisition price. So if the target goes up, price of the acquiring company goes down. What we’ve actually seen 
recently in the past several quarters is both stocks trading up, because investors are rewarding. I think that’s created a confidence in the C-suite. It’s created confidence in boards that it’s OK to go do this and I think, importantly, we’ve seen that engagement.”