Citigroup Names Bottega CDO

For the first time, a financial institution has formally created a c-level data executive position. CitiGroup's Corporate and Investment Banking (CIB) unit has named John Bottega as its Chief Data Officer (CDO). Bottega, who has 20 years experience managing and transforming reference data functions at Credit Suisse, Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers, will be responsible for planning and managing the CIB's data strategy, policies, line functions and data investments and working closely with the Citigroup's Global Infrastructure Conversion and Alignment Program (GICAP) team, CIB Technology and the CIB Data Council, according to a Citigroup statement.

The CDO is probably the rarest position in all industries, not just in financial services. There are just a handful of CDOs today. Although the so-called data czar position is a new one for financial services, Yahoo! appointed Usama Fayyad, a cofounder of the company now known as Revenue Science, to the newly-created position of CDO in December 2004. Other industrywide CDOs include Thomas Mueller, CDO of Allied Management Group, a medical and insurance fraud investigation firm, according to Wikipedia.org. And Michael Spears holds the title at NCCI Holdings, a workers compensation industry services provider.

Bottega also has extensive industry experience from his role as Executive Committee Chairman of the FISD (Software and Information Industry Association/Financial Information Services Division) and as a committee member of the EDM (Enterprise Data Management) Council. In addition, he has been a member of the SIA Standards and Protocols Committee, the Market Data Definition Language Committee and the ISO Standards Committee.

Bottega's "role is essential to realizing [CIBs] data strategy and defining clear data ownership that will help drive improved data flow between systems across Front Office, Operations, Finance, Compliance and Risk areas," according to the statement. Bottega was not available for comment at press time.

Greg MacSweeney is editorial director of InformationWeek Financial Services, whose brands include Wall Street & Technology, Bank Systems & Technology, Advanced Trading, and Insurance & Technology. View Full Bio