By Alexander Saeedy | Photography by Jose A. Alvarado Jr. for WSJ

Like millions of Americans, Mark Mason is looking for a new job. Unlike most of them, he is gunning to be a CEO.

The 56-year-old is fresh off his time as chief financial officer of Citigroup, capping off a nearly 25-year run where he helped the bank navigate the fallout from the 2008 financial crisis and a more recent regulatory crackdown.

His decision to leave was prompted by Citi Chief Executive Jane Fraser's move to also become chair of the company's board of directors, people familiar with the matter said. The consolidation of power signaled Fraser had more control over the bank's management and didn't have plans to leave her post anytime soon.

It isn't unusual for an ambitious executive to leave a company when the path to the top suddenly seems cut off. But while many executives stay vague about their ambitions, Mason has been public about his desire to run a company.

"I'm looking for an opportunity to lead and drive growth," Mason said in an interview.

Opportunities had come his way before, including a shot at the top job at Carlyle Group back in 2023, and research shows that CFOs of large financial institutions are more likely to become CEOs than are peers in other industries.

But executive recruiters say Mason's move to jump ship and get a simultaneous promotion to CEO -- known as a "double switch" -- might prove an uphill battle.

"The double switch tends not to work because the board will say you're untested as a CEO, even though we think you're a great leader," said Peter Crist, chairman of executive-recruitment firm Crist/Kolder Associates. "He's going to be relegated to going down the food chain in terms of the size of the enterprise to become a CEO, if that is his aspiration."

Mason, who is now executive vice chair and senior executive adviser, said he would stay on at Citigroup to advise Fraser on strategy but planned to leave by the end of the year. When it comes to finding a new job, "I'm still very much in the early days," he said.

From Queens to Wall Street

Mason grew up in Queens, New York, not far from the John F. Kennedy International Airport. Both of his grandfathers were small-business owners, and he spent his summers working for them as a landscaper and helping out with carpentry work.

He said he always had an entrepreneurial flair, selling bubblegum and popcorn from his Samsonite briefcase at Jamaica High School. After attending Howard University, he pursued his interest in finance at Harvard Business School.

Mason started at Citi in 2001 after a recruiter asked if he would be open to working at a bank. At the time, the bank was a mishmash of financial firms that had been recently cobbled together .

By 2008, Mason had ascended to an executive role in Citi's wealth-management division when the global financial crisis hit. Citi was arguably the most exposed of the big banks to toxic mortgage-backed securities, and by the beginning of 2009, it had taken multiple bailouts to prevent a collapse, with total government support totaling over $500 billion, according to estimates from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

Citi split itself into a core "good bank" and a "bad bank" that housed its toxic assets and unwanted lines of business. Mason canceled his Christmas vacation plans in December 2008 to work on a deal to sell Citi's prized wealth-management franchise, Smith Barney, to Morgan Stanley.

"I worked myself out of a job in the work that we did on that," he said. "But careers are defined in times of crisis."

After the deal with Morgan Stanley was completed, Michael Corbat, a rising executive at the time, asked Mason if he would help him run the "bad bank," called Citi Holdings.

Fraser, who was then overseeing Citi's strategy, said in an interview that running the troubled division "was taking one for the team."

Mason said he closed or sold over 60 separate units inside Citi and disposed of around $830 billion of assets. He also oversaw the elimination of around 60,000 jobs.

Soon after Citi Holdings was unwound in 2016, Mason said, Corbat, by then the bank's CEO, was grooming him to take over as chief financial officer, which he did in 2019.

'That is a fail'

Citi wasn't out of the woods even after the "bad bank" was shuttered.

The bank had never properly integrated the dozens of companies it had acquired in the 1990s and 2000s. For years after the 2008 financial crisis, regulators warned Citi about how it handled and stored data.

In 2020, Citi accidentally paid around $900 million to creditors of the cosmetics giant Revlon, after the bank failed to properly route a smaller payment from the company.

In October 2020, regulators fined the bank $400 million and ordered it to fix the problems. Fraser was named the bank's chief executive officer around that time.

The crackdown from regulators put Mason in a bind. As chief financial officer, he was overseeing billions of dollars of investment to fix the problems regulators had identified while also convincing shareholders that Citi was getting back on track after the 2008 financial crisis.

He got involved with the back-office transformation, wrangling data sources and figuring out why basic customer data like zip codes weren't loading into risk managers' compliance tools.

Executives elsewhere also refocused Citi's businesses, exiting low-returning areas such as municipal finance.

But problems kept cropping up. In April 2024, Citigroup accidentally credited $81 trillion to a client's account because of a back-office error. (The money was never actually sent.) Three months later, the bank was fined an additional $136 million after regulators said it wasn't moving fast enough to fix its problems.

Mason recalled the blunt conversation he had with his managing directors around that time. "The outcomes have not yet started to show up, and that is a fail," he recalled telling them.

Last year, Citi had to lower its profit target for 2026 because it needed to spend more on its turnaround. Executives now say they believe there are real signs of progress, and regulators have signaled that they agree.

"We're not done with everything yet," Fraser said. "But the heavy lift is behind us."

The bank's executives are eager for Citi to move on to its next chapter. After Mason said goodbye to staff, new CFO Gonzalo Luchetti wrote in an email to employees that Citigroup was "shifting our mindset from remediation to innovation." Luchetti's elevation was a surprise to some leaders in the bank, who expected one of Mason's lieutenants to be elevated to the role once he left, people familiar with the matter said.

Mason won't be around for the new era, but he is ready to help transform other companies -- eventually.

"The first step is for me to kind of take a breather after the pace that I've been running for seven years," he said.

Write to Alexander Saeedy at alexander.saeedy@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

March 18, 2026 10:00 ET (14:00 GMT)

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