Citibank is one of the largest banks in the world. It has numerous branches in the New York City metropolitan area and thousands of offices throughout the world. The bank’s history dates from June 16, 1812, when the New York State Legislature granted a charter to the City Bank of New York. The bank entered the national system in 1865.
In 1955, the National City Bank merged with the First National Bank of the City of New York to form the First National City Bank of New York. The name of the bank was changed to Citibank in 1976, and the name of its holding company became Citicorp. In 1998, Citicorp merged with Travelers Group, an insurance company that also owned businesses in credit and finance. The merger created the largest financial services organization in the world. The new holding company created out of the merger was named Citigroup.
Citigroup’s strategy of offering a large number of different types of financial services proved unsuccessful. During the finance and credit crisis of 2008, the banking division, Citibank, suffered steep losses. Citigroup required $20 billion from the financial industry bailout fund managed by the U.S. federal government and began to sell off pieces of its financial empire. By February 2009, the U.S. government had increased its stake in Citigroup to 36 percent to prevent the bank’s failure. By December 2009, private investors had provided the capital to allow Citigroup to buy out the U.S. government’s stake in Citibank and to repay the loans from the government.
In 2014, Citigroup agreed to pay a record $7 billion in civil penalties to settle claims by the U.S. Department of Justice that the bank had knowingly sold poor-quality residential mortgage loans to investors, heavily contributing to the 2008 financial crisis. Citigroup was among six of the world’s largest banks that were fined a total of $5.8 billion in 2015 by federal regulators in a currency- and interest rate-rigging scheme. Citigroup and three of the banks—JPMorgan Chase & Co., Barclays Plc, and The Royal Bank of Scotland Plc—pleaded guilty to criminal charges of conspiring to fix the price of U.S. dollars and euros traded on the foreign currency exchange market. UBS AG and Bank of America were also fined in connection with the rate-rigging scheme.
