Citigroup Inc. (C) said Tuesday that former Morgan Stanley (MS) exec Sanjiv Das will replace Bill Beckmann as president of the CitiMortgage franchise, effective July 16. Das, who previously worked at Citigroup in a global mortgage group from 1991 through 1999, was most recently a managing director at Morgan Stanley’s institutional securities group. The move comes after Beckmann, who worked for Citigroup for more than two decades, left the company at the end of June to spend more time with his family. In January, Beckmann was tapped by CEO Vikram Pandit to run the bank’s consolidated U.S. residential mortgage business, after the company decided to streamline its operations in the area. CitiMortgage employed 3,600 people as of March, about 1,000 fewer than one year ago, according to company filings with the SEC. “It’s obviously a very challenging time in terms of industry and there are many more companies that are doing the same thing we are,” said Mark Rodgers, spokesman for Citigroup, referring to ongoing layoffs at the company in a report published Tuesday by the St. Charles Journal, a local daily that originally broke the story of Beckmann’s replacement. Disclosure: The author held no positions in C or MS when this story was originally published. HW reporters and writers follow a strict disclosure policy, the first in the mortgage trade.