Marty Lippert Moves up from Citi CIO Slot

Within weeks of his arrival at Citi, Marty Lippert has been promoted from its CIO to Chief Operations and Technology Officer, BS&T has learned. Lippert takes over from Kevin Kessinger who remains on staff "as a senior advisor to the global O&T [operations and technology] organization. What he'll do after that hasn't yet been announced," a spokeswoman said. Lippert joined Citi in early July and the unannounced change took place in early September.

Lippert's is among several significant appointments at Citi lately. Vikram Pandit has installed several new, upper managers to transform Citi, since late last year when he rose to chief executive of the $2.1 trillion-asset global bank, that was hard hit by the subprime crisis.

Immediately under Pandit is Don Callahan, Citi's Chief Administrative Officer. Lippert now reports directly to Callahan, as does Debby Hopkins, who was appointed in spring as Chief Innovation Officer, although she is not in the technology area.

Lippert now is responsible for the following areas: Citi Technology, Infrastructure; Citi Shared Services; IT Risk & Program Office; Citi Realty Services; Executive Services; Global O&T's Centralized Staff Functions: Global O&T Strategy & Planning; O&T Legal; O&T Finance; O&T Administration; O&T HR; Citi's Product/Regional O&T Heads; Citi's Region & Product CIOs.

He came to Citi from RBC, Toronto, which has been lauded for remodeling itself around web 2.0 technology. Lippert was vice chairman and group head of global technology and operations for the U.S. $616 billion-asset bank.

In appointing Lippert to Citi's newly centralized Global Technology and Operations, Pandit commented: "Marty's appointment emphasizes the importance we place on technology in driving enterprise transformation, and we'll look to him to be a key architect of that change."

Lippert declined to comment on his appointment or what aspect of Citi technology he will focus on first.