Citi hit a key profitability target early, but not everyone will be celebrating
It was a bit of a Super Tuesday for investment banking results today. JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, and Bank of America all posted Q2 and H1 results for 2026. The last one posting results today was Citi, which said in its presentation that it was the “best quarterly revenue in a decade for the firm.”
Click here to join the bubble by eFinancialCareers, our new anonymous community. ✍️
On one hand, the bank did do well. The firm’s return on tangible common equity (RoTCE) was 13% in Q2 of 2026, on par with Q1, and ahead of the same period last year. An 11 to 13% RoTCE was a goal that Jane Fraser set at its 2026 investor day, with a target to meet it in 2028. Citi is well ahead of that schedule.
But two teams at Citi were disappointing: its equities sales & trading team, and its M&A team.
Citi’s equities team, which Fraser said “showed continued momentum”, posted Q2 of 2026 revenue up 45% on Q2 of 2025, and H1 of 2026 revenue up 42% on H1 of 2025. But Citi already has the smallest equities business of its peers, and of the four banks that reported today, Citi had the slowest Q2 and H1 growth.
Its M&A team, meanwhile, posted a 4% revenue decline in the second quarter, the only one of the four banks reporting today that reported a decline. In the first half of the year, it was only up 7%, compared to 46, 48, and 61% up at the other three banks that reported.
The only real highlight of Citi’s quarter (and its first half of the year) was its capital markets team. Its equity capital markets (ECM) team in particular was up by 91% in the first half of the year, beating out Goldman Sachs, which had a particularly strong quarter owing to its lead left position on the SpaceX IPO. Debt Capital Markets (DCM) also did well, up by 30%, ahead of every bank except for Goldman.
Fixed income, currencies, and commodities (FICC) sales & trading revenue was relatively middle of the road, up by 10%, about on par with Goldman (up 9%), both behind JPMorgan (up 14%) and ahead of BofA (up 5%). Its prime brokerage also did well. Revenue was up by 60% to a record high in the second quarter.
Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share? Contact: +44 7537 182250 (SMS, WhatsApp or voicemail). Telegram: @SarahButcher. Signal: sarahbutcher.22 Click here to fill in our anonymous form, or email editortips@efinancialcareers.com.
Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: comments are moderated intermittently by human beings. Sometimes these humans might be asleep, or away from their desks, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. You must take sole responsibility for comments you post on this site. We will take reasonable steps to weed out anything that we consider to be offensive or inappropriate.
