Nadir Mahmud smiles at the irony of it. He’s been global head of Citi’s foreign exchange business for only a matter of weeks, and he’s already achieved something that has been a clear ambition of the bank for more than a decade: to reclaim its position as the leading global foreign exchange house.
Citi beat Deutsche Bank, winner for the previous nine years, by the narrowest of margins to top the overall market share rankings in Euromoney’s 2014 FX survey. Citi had dominated the Euromoney survey since its inception in 1976, winning the overall ranking for the first 23 years. In 1999 Deutsche won the survey, with Citi regaining top spot from 2000 to 2002.
Then, from 2003, the bank started to slip behind such rivals as Deutsche, UBS and Barclays and even RBS, reaching a low point in 2009 of a fifth-place ranking and a market share of just 7.32%. Over the past five years, that volume has more than doubled to 16.04% – enough to reclaim the top spot from Deutsche, whose market share this year was 15.67%.
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Mahmud has played his own role in Citi’s revival, as previously he was head of regional markets for Asia-Pacific, one of the core FX markets for the bank.