Citi won’t detail layoff impact on Idaho card center

Citigroup won’t say how a companywide plan to cut about 52,000 jobs impacts the Citi Cards customer service center in Meridian, which employs about 1,400.

Citi Cards is the largest consumer business within Citi, according to the Citigroup.com Web site. Citi Cards employs more than 32,000 people at more than 30 sites in North America. The unit is the world’s largest provider of credit cards, with more than 150 million accounts generating a total of more than $144 billion in receivables, Citigroup said.

Citi is not breaking down the job cuts by business or region, Janis Tarter, with Citi Consumer Group Public Affairs in San Francisco, said in an e-mail to The Idaho Business Review.

Regarding Citi Card's Meridian customer service center, Tarter said later in a phone interview that the center continues to hire at this time, but is not immune to future downsizing.

“Our goal, as Citi CEO Vikram Pandit announced, is to have Citi's headcount total approximately 300,000 in the first half of 2009,” she said. As of Sept.30, 2008, the company’s headcount totaled 352,000, she said.

Citi plans to reduce that number by about another 50,000 people from its Sept. 30 reported levels, Tarter said. “We will reach this remaining headcount reduction target through divestitures, attrition and layoffs.”

Despite a challenging environment, she said, Citi “is in a far stronger position going into 2009 than we were going into 2008. And we are even better positioned for 2010.” The company has almost doubled its loan loss reserves in the last 12 months, she said. Over the past 15 months, Citi has added $75 billion in new capital, and “we have been very successful at bringing our expenses down.”