They are on their way to become a new credit suisse, hopefully this helps to change that course.
If you are interested in this subject, compare it to other big banks like JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America etc. The difference is abysmal.
Isn't Citi as different from Chase bank as Microsoft is from Google?
Sure - they are both "financial" companies just like Microsoft and Google are both "tech" companies.
They couldn't be more different other than both being tech companies.
The fact that JP Morgan Chase reported Q4 profit at $9.3 bln on the highest annual revenue for any bank EVER, and Bank of America reported Q4 profit at $3.1bln, while Citibank reported net LOSS of $1.8bln, should tell you everything you need to know about how well these organization are managed.
Other brokerages do the same sorts of things, Fidelity isn't alone in this. Schwab went a different way and decided to just buy a bank. Instead of like the BOA/Chase versions, where they bought a brokerage.
But even if it was $100k savings, you can get ~5% APY at BoA high yield savings through Merrill anyways. I don't recommend that since Fidelity works better for that type of account, but you could do it.
All three feature an investment bank, a commercial bank and an asset manager. There are a number of smaller operations which have all three but none at the scale of those three. Wells is much smaller, and HSBC isn’t a US bank. Goldman and Morgan Stanley don’t really have a commercial banks and neither do the mega sized asset managers like Blackrock.
So the thing is Citi isn’t really a bad commercial bank and is really useful for corporate treasury services if you’re a large multinational company. Their international footprint is huge and fit a lot of use cases it’s either them or HSBC.
The problem is the IB and AM are ‘meh’ and hugely inefficient. It’s not like they do such a terrible job from a customer perspective. From an investor perspective it just costs so much to do it.