Citi recruits eBay data chief in Asia
(6 December 2017 – Asia) Citigroup has poached eBay’s chief data officer to head up data and analytics for its retail operations in Asia.
Citi said it had hired Zoher Karu, who led eBay’s data operations since 2013. Prior to that he was head of marketing analytics at Sears, the US department store.
He will oversee data and analytics at the US bank’s expanding digital retail franchise in Asia, covering 17 markets.
By tapping into client data, Citi says it can tailor more suitable product offerings to clients.
Over the past year, Citi has made several technology hires to its bank. In June, it appointed Shinjini Kumar to head retail operations in India. She was previously the chief executive at Paytm, an Indian payments and ecommerce company. It has also hired executives from PayPal and Amazon to its financial technology operations Citi FinTech.
Along with peers HSBC and Standard Chartered, Citi is competing for a share of Asia’s valuable retail banking market. The bank has sought to appeal to a generation of young, wealthy clients that prefer to bank on their mobile phones as opposed to visiting physical branches.
But it also faces competition from local companies, such as Ant Financial in China and Kakao Bank in Korea, which already operate strong digital banking and electronic payments franchises.
Kakao Bank opened 300,000 new accounts within its first 24 hours of business when it launched in June this year, demonstrating pent up demand for fully digital banking services in the country.
Last month, HSBC said it had hired the former Europe chairman of Google payments, Mike Warriner, as chief information officer for its retail bank. Tesco’s chief digital officer Thomas Nielsen moved to Deutsche Bank in September to take a similar job for the bank’s global transactions business.
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