The U.S. bank Citigroup Inc., plans on exiting its retail banking and credit card operations in Argentina, Brazil and Colombia, in an effort to reduce costs and spur profits as South America's three largest economies suffer a downturn.
The full exit plan has not yet been announced publicly, but in a statement released on Friday the bank said that it will scale back its retail operations while continuing to service corporate clients in the three countries, in order to concentrate resources where they will be most profitable, the Associated Press reports.
"We have decided to focus our efforts on opportunities with our institutional clients in these countries and throughout the wider region," Citibank CEO Michael Corbat stated.
The bank has been scaling back the company's international consumer banking operations since at least 2012, according to Reuters. Along with its peers on Wall Street, Citigroup has had to resort to aggressive cost controls as near-zero interest rates, plummeting oil prices, and investor squeamishness due to slowed growth in China have negatively impacted its revenue development.
The Latin American businesses being sold are a part of Citibank's consumer banking operations, which will be transferred over to Citi Holdings. Citi Holdings is the branch that handles non-core assets that the bank is phasing out or selling, Bloomberg explains.
By the end of the fourth quarter, Citi Holdings had $74 billion in assets, which was 43 percent lower than the previous year and represented around 4 percent of Citigroup assets in total.
Citibank has been operating in the region for more than 100 years, with businesses in 25 cities in Argentina and 26 in Brazil, according to the Citibank website. In 2014, the New York-based bank dropped consumer banking in 11 other Latin American countries.
