Mapping out the great Citi crypto exodus

Amid the rush of talent moving from traditional finance to crypto, one bank has emerged as a veritable launchpad into the crypto industry. 

By The Block’s count, no fewer than 15 top-flight Citi employees have left the American bank for a digital asset-focused destination over the past year. Their new homes include top jobs at Copper, CoinFund, Paxos, Genesis, the Provenance Blockchain Foundation and as-yet-unnamed ventures, among others.

A representative for Citi declined to comment on this story when reached. 

The exact reasons why so many Citi employees have left for the crypto industry are not clear. But the departures also fit with a larger industry trend: lots of people have been switching careers and moving from banking to crypto.

JPMorgan’s Christine Moy left the firm in February for an unspecified new venture. Bitpanda Pro’s CEO Joshua Barraclough is also ex-JPMorgan. Barclays’ leaver Dirk Klee went to Bitcoin Suisse and the Near Foundation brought on Marieke Flament from NatWest’s subsidiary Mettle. The list goes on. 

The departures from Citi follow signals from the bank that it is jetting ahead with its own digital assets plan. It was only in May last year that Citi hinted it would look at launching crypto custody and trading due to a "very rapid" accumulation of interest in bitcoin from large clients. June 2021 saw Citi launch its in-house crypto unit within its wealth management division. The bank has also outlined ambitious hiring plans, saying it will bring in up to 100 new people to staff its institutional client group's digital asset division. 

The in-house strides haven’t kept people in place, however. Here are the Citi execs that have left over the past year:

March 2021: Ioana Surpateanu 

Ioana Surpateanu left Citi in March 2021, after four years there. She co-headed European government affairs and acted as Citi's innovation strategy lead. 

Since then, Surpateanu worked a brief stint as chief strategy officer for the DIA Association, a project creating open-source oracles for DeFi. After that she took an executive board seat at the Multichain Asset Managers Association and an advisory role for Cryptowalkers and Poolz Finance. She is also in the process of co-creating an accelerator dedicated to Web3/Metaverse projects in Israel.

September 2021: Chris Perkins

Chris Perkins left his position as managing director of Citi in September last year, after 13 years at the bank, to become president of investment firm CoinFund. He says he made the move because “the opportunity in web3 is much bigger than in finance.”

“There’s just a parabolic opportunity set,” he told The Block. The digital assets space is at an inflection point, he said. “We have an opportunity to change the world." 

Perkins had first mulled a move to digital assets in 2017. But at the time the terrain was different and he had a lower appetite for risk. “Now, it’s incredibly obvious you have an amazing opportunity to build something special in this space,” he said.

October 2021: Morgan McKenney 

Morgan McKenney spent over a decade at Citi in a range of senior operating roles globally, most recently as COO for global consumer banking.

When she left Citi she went on to serve as special advisor at Centre, a consortium to promote the use of fiat-backed stablecoins, and as a Bain expert advisor in digital assets. She now heads up the Provenance Blockchain Foundation as its CEO.  “There are other games in town, now,” she told The Block. 

“The agility of some of these younger firms is appealing to people who’ve spent time at a sprawling global entity,” she said. “The alternative presented has got so much tailwind.” 

November 2021: Matt Zhang 

Matt Zhang launched his $1.5 billion crypto venture fund Hivemind Capital Partners in November to much fanfare. The move followed a 14-year stint at Citi, where he was global co-head of structured products trading.  

Hivemind, a new crypto investment outfit, based out of New York, focuses on four strategies — yield staking, trading, venture capital investments, and play-to-earn (P2E) gaming. 

March 2022: Lee Smallwood

You are 117 days late, but welcome to the party! 😎 @TheBoySmalls https://t.co/bBpDwTsfnW

— Matt Zhang (@zhang_matt) March 28, 2022

Lee Smallwood followed Zhang to Hivemind, and, according to his LinkedIn, is now acting as its COO and managing partner. His most recent role at Citi was head of rates in the digital assets vertical. He worked at Citi for more than six years. 

Smallwood told Bloomberg in an interview at the time the move was announced that, while he had first bought bitcoin in 2014, he decided to take crypto on full time as he fielded more inquiries about digital assets from clients and colleagues.

February 2022: Scott Helfman

Scott Helfman spent more than a decade at Citi, where he served as director of public affairs. Now he heads up communications for Arca. 

His hire was part of Arca’s mission and to strengthen partnerships and engagements, the firm said at the time. At Citi, he had been responsible for spearheading communication initiatives across all sales and trading, fixed income, currencies and commodities businesses.

March 2022: Sandy Kaul

Several sources have told The Block that Sandy Kaul, Citi’s global head of business advisory services at Citi Prime Finance, is leaving the bank. 

According to Kaul’s LinkedIn, she has been with Citi since 2009, where she produced primary research and thought leadership on the evolution of the hedge fund and alternatives investment industry. She focused on shifting attitudes and service expectations across key investor segments and managers.

The Block contacted Kaul for comment on her next moves but did not hear back by the time of publication. It's not clear whether or not she'll be entering a role purely focused on digital assets. 

March 2022: Mike Fabrizi 

The Block can also reveal that Mike Fabrizi has left Citi after four years, and is set to join trading platform Genesis as director of account management. According to his LinkedIn, his most recent role at Citi was as a director for FX digital asset voice sales. 

"We're excited to have Mike join the Genesis team. He brings broad institutional relationships and a proven track record of exceptional client service,” said Leon Marshall, head of sales at Genesis.

The Block contacted Fabrizi for comment but did not hear back by the time of publication. 

March 2022: Alex Kriete, Greg Girasole and Frank Cavallo 

In 2017, Alex Kriete and Greg Girasole started writing an internal, crypto-focused newsletter at Citi. That helped them become known as the go-to people inside the bank for crypto-related questions. Off the back of other work, and that newsletter, Citi appointed the pair co-heads of digital assets at the bank in June 2021.

Now, they are spearheading an as-yet-undisclosed new venture, which will be a three-way equal share partnership with ex-Citi investment counselor Frank Cavallo, who also spent 12 years at the bank. The project is apparently inspired by the heavy demand they have seen for digital assets among ultra-high net worth clients.

“Financial institutions have a hard time keeping pace in this market,” Kriete told The Block. “We’re excited to build something that caters to these people.”

March 2022: Austin Campbell

Austin Campbell also left Citi in March, moving to blockchain infrastructure platform Paxos for his next challenge. Previously, he headed up part of Citi’s global rates trading vertical for a year and a half.

“People are asking: what’s your forward view on the value of equity,” says Campbell on the rush of bankers moving to crypto. He is now leading Paxos’ growth, cash and DeFi partnerships. 

According to Campbell, the fact that large-scale companies and regulators are starting to take crypto seriously helps explain the exodus from traditional finance to digital assets. 

“It’s no longer a bunch of hobbyists building things,” he says, citing the exponential growth of stablecoins. “When you look at tradfi people, those who are younger are the ones that are getting the punchline quickly.”

March 2022: ​​Daniel Carson 

Daniel Carson was at Citi for under a year, acting as its vice president of corporate FX sales in North America. He had previously spent almost five years at French bank BNP Paribas in similar roles. 

Now he has landed at crypto wallet and trading firm Abra, working in high net worth and institutional sales. 

March 2022: Sabrina Wilson

Sabrina Wilson joined custody powerhouse Copper as its COO in March. She previously served as a managing director and the global co-head of futures, OTC clearing and FX prime brokerage at Citi, having worked at the bank for more than four years. 

"It’s a great time to be joining this new world of financial services, where there is so much still to build, and for me, it’s exciting to be part of a team and a business whose primary mission is to help institutional investors adopt this new asset class securely and bridge the gap to the traditional sector," Wilson said in an emailed statement. 

Early 2022: Omid Malekan

Omid Malekan's exit from Citi Ventures is striking. The Columbia Business School adjunct professor stuck by the firm during the depths of the crypto bear market in 2018. While he was there, Citi Ventures invested in crypto firms including Chain, DataRobot, and Unbound. 

Malekan left over a month ago, for unknown reasons. He has since scrubbed his history at the firm from his LinkedIn profile. 

Before Citi Ventures, Malekan led a quantitative firm called Omid Malekan Asset Management. Prior to that, he worked as an operations manager for Formula Capital. 

The last thing he said publicly related to Citi was a blog post, published on Citi.com, outlining the institutional adoption of crypto. "Perhaps the biggest crypto development of last year (other than price) was the rapid normalization among institutional clients, a development that certain pundits have been speculating about for years," Malekan wrote. 

This piece was updated after publication to reflect the fact that Sabrina Wilson joined Copper in March, not December, as previously reported. 

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