Citi boss to pick battles against big four Julian Potter says Citibank wants to 'look beyond the pure financial need, at the lifestyle goals of customers'. AS a South African native with a soft spot for the Wallabies, Julian Potter is no stranger to feeling a little conflicted when going into battle. But the new boss of Citibank has a crystal-clear view on where the global banking giant can better compete against the domestic big four banks and where it can't. "The real growth is going to come from meeting more of the customers' needs and we want to look beyond the pure financial need, at the lifestyle goals of customers," Potter tells The Australian in his first interview since taking the reins. Where they want to live, go on holiday, work overseas, where they want to eat and play and how do we help them meet those needs . . . That is an area we can really compete. We can't go head to head with the big four on a mass market play. There's no source of true differentiation we can bring to that, but we do think we can truly compete for the emerging affluent and affluent customer. Potter, whose official title is head of consumer banking for Citi Australia, took responsibility for Citibank five months ago following the promotion of Roy Gori to a new regional role in Asia. He inherits a business with 1100 staff that last year generated a 5 per cent rise in profit before tax to $454 million as revenue rose 3 per cent to $1.4 billion. That compares with a $49m loss for Citi's investment bank on revenue of $215m, an improved result marred by the worst year for corporate activity since the global financial crisis. While investment banking conditions are slowly improving, the results highlight the importance of Potter's role for the bank's local operations, overseen by country head Stephen Roberts. Potter has taken the reins as the big four banks' margins are pressured by rising competition amid low interest rates and ahead of new Treasurer Joe Hockey's financial services inquiry. Potter says he can see no "red flags" from the inquiry and argues there's plenty of competition, albeit there are few banks with "differentiated propositions." He says the previous government's planned levy on deposits to help pay for bailouts of banks may not be the right structure but there is a case "for the industry to provide some sort of financial support toward it." Critics say Citibank, which has built a strong credit card business -- it is fifth by market share behind National Australia Bank -- has failed to gain a meaningful position in other products such as mortgages. While Citibank increased its mortgage book 12 per cent to $8.1bn last year, it pales in comparison with Commonwealth Bank's $373bn slice of the $1.3 trillion home-loan market. Many people may think of Citibank as a provider of credit cards. Importantly now, we need to say we are a full-service bank, there are no products we don't offer," Potter says. The truly big opportunities, he says, lie in delivering customer experience. Product, pricing, offers . . . you can lead the market for a period of time, but quite quickly competitors can follow that. I think the battle ground for success, if you like, is going to be this culture of being obsessed about the client experience. Potter, who left Citi in 2007 for a stint at Macquarie before rejoining in late 2011 to run the cards business, says Gori left him a business in great shape. He highlights the launch of products such as the fee-free transaction account and a relentless focus on productivity, saying its cost-to-income ratio is competitive with the big four. Another is its popular dining program, with the bank giving away more than 80,000 bottles of wine in about three years to customers who pay at restaurants with their Citi card. Potter plans to leverage the local unit's impending shift to Citigroup's global core banking platform to launch new products. One will be the launch of Citi's premier miles program in Australia, he says, which allows customers to redeem points with more than 100 airlines. The great thing is we're small locally but we've got the global scale . . . There's a lot of good stuff going on in Citibank globally, so let's adopt it locally as we move on to these common platforms, which enables us to bring things to market quicker than we may if we designed it, developed it and launched it ourselves.