Citigroup recognized the growing economic influence of women as wealth holders and financial decision-makers but lacked a cohesive strategy to serve this segment. The challenge was to develop relevant products, services, and engagement models that addressed women's specific financial needs without appearing tokenistic.
Vivaldi developed a comprehensive strategy for Women & Co combining segment insights, product innovation, and experience design. The approach integrated tailored financial planning tools, educational content, and community-building initiatives, all connected to core Citigroup capabilities.
Women & Co established Citigroup as a leader in serving women's financial needs. The initiative attracted new clients, deepened existing relationships, and generated insights that influenced broader Citigroup product and service design.
Citigroup engaged Vivaldi to build a credible strategy for serving women as wealth holders and primary financial decision-makers, a segment the bank had identified as economically significant but lacked a coherent way to address. Vivaldi combined segment insights, product innovation, and experience design into a single platform that integrated tailored financial planning tools, educational content, and community-building with core Citigroup capabilities, attracting new clients and informing broader product and service design across the bank.
Citigroup is one of the world’s largest financial services companies, headquartered in New York City, with operations in over 95 countries. Citigroup provides consumer banking, corporate and investment banking, wealth management, and securities services, with annual revenues well in excess of $70 billion.
Vivaldi defined the strategy, product, and experience model for Women & Co as a platform serving women’s financial needs rather than a marketing program aimed at them. The work attracted new clients, deepened relationships with existing ones, and generated insights that informed product and service design across Citigroup’s wider business.
The platform was anchored in segment insights about how women actually make financial decisions across life stages, then translated into product, planning tools, content, and community in equal measure rather than leading with branding. Tokenism shows up when a financial services company changes the marketing and not the offer, so the engagement model and product design had to do the load-bearing work before any communications followed.
Women now control a growing share of investable wealth and are frequently the primary decision-maker on family financial planning, but most wealth management products were designed around assumptions and life patterns that do not match how the segment makes decisions. Treating the segment with a dedicated strategy is how a bank captures the asset flows that follow, rather than ceding them to competitors who built around it.
The transferable lesson is that segment platforms only earn loyalty when product, planning, content, and community are designed together, because any one of those alone reads as a marketing veneer. Banks that try to address underserved segments through communications first and product second tend to lose the segment to competitors who reversed that order.