Citibank’s latest earnings release reveals that, despite an overall uptick in retail banking, its mortgage originations took a 16% tumble year-over-year in the second quarter.
This news comes after the bank’s posturing to re-enter the mortgage space earlier this year with the adoption of a new digital mortgage origination platform through Digital Risk and Black Knight. The 16% decrease in originations is not a good sign for the bank's growth efforts, but the silver lining is a 13% increase in the bank's mortgage originations over last quarter.
This shows some momentum for Citi in its efforts to re-establish its presence in the mortgage industry, but it clearly has more work to do to make up the 16% YoY gap.
Despite this lack of growth in YoY originations, Citi CEO Michael Corbat expressed optimism at the growth of the bank’s other business lines.
“During the quarter, we drove strong year-over-year revenue growth in many of our businesses – including our international consumer franchise, treasury and trade solutions, equities, and the private bank. And we continue to support our clients as evidenced by solid loan growth that was balanced across businesses and geographies. Our focus on expenses has given us the ability to self-fund many of our investments and resulted in an improvement in our efficiency ratio for both the second quarter and through the first half of this year,” Corbat said in a statement.
Citi's North American global consumer banking revenues increased by 1% this quarter, which the release attributes to higher revenues in retail banking and Citi retail services. With the exception of mortgages, Citi's North American retail banking revenues increased by 9%.
“These results demonstrate good momentum across our franchise and that we are firmly on track to achieve the financial targets," Corbat said.
