Technology change key to Citigroup restructuring plan

Global financial services firm Citigroup has announced a continued streamlining of its technology spending, in association with restructuring which will see the loss of around 17,000 jobs worldwide.

Simplification and standardisation of the group’s IT systems were critical to increasing efficiency and driving down costs as well as decreasing time to market, the firm said.

It said it was planning to consolidate datacentres and limit the number of software vendors to operate at scale.

It also plans to standardise how the company develops, deploys and runs applications – a move which could bode ill for the development team it inherited when the firm bought online bank Egg earlier this year.

In 2004, Egg used agile programming techniques to upgrade its Money Manager product in three months.

Citigroup also said it planned to consolidate certain back-office, middle-office and corporate functions at the business, regional and headquarters levels to eliminate duplication of effort. More than 9,500 jobs would be moved to lower-cost locations, both domestically and internationally, with about two-thirds going through attrition, it said.

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