CE 100 Index Adds 0.8% as Bank Sector Surges Amid Citi, Goldman Reshuffling

The Banking group, overall, was up 3.9%. And within that sector, several marquee names announced management changes or initiatives designed to revamp operations.

Citi added 5.2%. As reported here, Citi said this past week that it is tackling a major restructuring of its organization that eliminates a number of management layers.

The new structure, as reported, elevates the leaders of the banking giant’s five businesses while also doing away with a number of positions.

“I am determined that our bank will deliver to our full potential, and we’re making bold decisions to meet our commitments to all our stakeholders,” Citi CEO Jane Fraser said in tandem with this past week’s announcement. While we noted the actual number of positions to be eliminated was not detailed, Citi has said it will eliminate management layers in its personal banking & wealth management and institutional clients groups, along with regional layers in Asia Pacific, Europe, Middle East, Africa and Latin America.

Goldman Makes Moves Among the Management Ranks

Goldman Sachs also was up 5.2%. The company this week reshuffled its leadership team in the wake of the retirement of longtime executive Laurence Stein. With over 25 years with Goldman, Stein served as executive vice president and chief operating officer of asset and wealth management operations. According to an announcement provided to PYMNTS, he will be succeeded by Will Bousquette, who had been chief operating officer of Goldman’s global banking and markets division.

Ericka Leslie, Goldman’s chief administrative officer, will replace Bousquette as COO of global banking and markets. As we’ve noted in past coverage, Goldman Sachs has split its business into three smaller divisions. The bank has also been paring back its consumer business — such as the sale of GreenSky, its FinTech lending unit — as it focuses more on its wealthiest clients.

Also within the banking group, MUFG gained 6.1%. As reported earlier in the month via sites such as Nikkei Asia, Mizuho has said it will help support Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group’s stablecoin issuance platform.

The platform, Progmat Coin, will help banks make instant settlements using stablecoins.

WeWork’s wild ride continues; the shares were up 59.6%, pushing its pillar ahead by 3%. Bloomberg reported that as the company is “flirting with bankruptcy,” its landlords may have to face that they may have to embrace lease concessions. “If the company opts for Chapter 11, its landlords will be forced to either accept deals on rent or be kicked to nearly the back of the repayment line,” Bloomberg noted, citing industry observers.

Those gains were tempered by DocuSign’s 12.5% slide. Computer Weekly reported that Inhi Cho Suh, president of product, technology and operations at DocuSign, speaking at DocuSign Momentum 2023 Singapore, said, “we want to not only manage single documents but also orchestrate the entire process. We currently manage over six petabytes of contract data for our customers, which puts us in a unique position,” Suh said. The comments underscore the use by DocuSign of open-source large language models (LLMs) to streamline and improve contract and agreement workflows.

Netflix gave up 10.4%, leading the “Have Fun” pillar down 0.5%. As reported by Yahoo Finance shares trended lower following comments from CFO Spencer Neumann at Bank of America’s Media, Communications, and Entertainment Conference. The CFO remarked that full-year operating margins will be in the range of 18% to 20% — lower than recent highs that were 21%. Margins should trend higher, he said, based on the continuing crackdown on password sharing and ad-supported options, but the initiatives will take time to bear fruit.

“We’re still in the crawl of the crawl-walk-run stage, so it is not easy to build an ad business from scratch. We’ve got a lot of work to do,” he said.