Pam Habner, head of U.S. branded cards and lending at Citi, came from a family of lawyers, and thought she would follow in their footsteps. "I took one semester of law classes and quickly decided that it wasn't for me," she said.
After graduating with a degree in math and psychology from Dartmouth College, Habner worked as a consultant for Bain & Company. "I did that because I thought it would be a great introduction to the world of business, working in a variety of industries and working on a range of business problems from how do you grow, how do you re-engineer and how do you cut expenses," she said.
She spent three years at Bain, and then headed to Harvard to get an MBA. She discovered that she wanted to be a general manager: "At the time, when you thought of general management, you thought of consumer product companies like General Mills, P&G, Kraft and Clorox." Habner spent a summer internship at Clorox. The experience confirmed that she liked management, but she "wasn't so excited about that business product."
She looked at other companies, including Disney, Pepsi, IBM and American Express. She interviewed with all of them, but the one that really clicked for her was American Express and consumer financial services. She loved the variety inherent in the general manager role, and said that credit card marketing and credit card management is "part Federal Reserve and part Vanity Fair."
At the time, Habner said that then-CEO Ken Chenault had his own internal strategic planning group that operated like a small consulting firm. "I got to leverage my consulting experience, but also had a bird's eye view on how to manage the company through Ken's eyes. And from that, I rolled off into more general management roles and spent 18 years there doing every variety of strategy, product management, new product development, partnership management, in the consumer world, but also in a bit in commercial. It was a great experience that got me hooked on financial services."
While Habner loved her time at Amex, she was lured away to work for a couple of startups during the dotcom bubble that began during the late 1990s. She first joined a company called LinkShare, which was one of the first affiliate marketing networks, and then went to work at DoubleClick, a large provider of Internet advertising. The pivot from working at a large company to a startup was exciting and challenging, she said: "It allowed me to build processes to make decisions quickly, take a lot of risks, and work with a lot of autonomy."
While both LinkShare and DoubleClick survived the dotcom crash of late 2002, Habner returned to Amex in January of 2013. She brought with her the "scrappiness" and "owner's mentality" she learned during her four years at the startups, and spent the next 11 years at Amex as a general manager of product management, marketing and global commercial services.
Launching the first viral credit card
In fall of 2014, Habner was recruited by JPMorgan to run its card business. She was responsible for all of the acquisition marketing, customer marketing, and analytics, among other functions. In 2016, Habner's team launched the Sapphire Reserve credit card, the first ever credit card to go viral. It came with a 100,000-point introductory bonus and a slew of other, never-seen-before perks. The card was so popular that Chase temporarily ran out of the metal slabs it needed to produce the cards.
The following year, Habner was asked to manage JPMorgan's retail branch banking and wealth management. "It was a career development opportunity. I had never worked in retail branch banking or wealth management before," she said. To take on the role, Habner had to take the series 7, 9 and 10 exams in order to manage the bank's financial advisors. She was in charge of 5,000 branches and a combined 50,000 employees. "I learned how to manage a field force at scale," she said. "We grew dramatically. We were opening new branches and accelerated the growth of the financial advisory business. It was a fantastic experience."
In the summer of 2020, Habner was recruited again, this time by Citigroup. She was brought on to run the bank's branded card and lending business, and now oversees nine direct reports and a team of 350 staffers. "I manage our proprietary branded products, our rewards products, our cash cards, and then our color-value products, like our diamond preferred card. And I manage our co-brands with partners like Costco and American Airlines," she explained.
She is also responsible for Citi's "unsecured lending business." While she said that credit cards can be regarded as unsecured loans, Citi has also added a buy now pay later option called "Citi Flex" that allows card holders to split eligible purchases into fixed monthly payments. The bank also offers standalone personal installment loans that aren't linked to a credit card. Members can get a loan for up to $30,000 for such things as debt consolidation, weddings, home improvements, with a loan term that can range between one and five years.
Last month, Habner's team rolled out "Citi Shop," a free desktop extension which automatically searches and applies discounts and coupons when a Citi member shops online. The program currently has more than 5,000 merchant-partners and offers deals in categories ranging from clothing, electronics and pet products.
After the post-pandemic surge in spending on travel and entertainment, among other categories, Habner said that the industry is back to a more normalized environment: "We aren't seeing the same year-over-year growth in spending. As some customers have worked through their savings stock, but their spending has continued, they're now turning to [credit] cards to help them manage their life, much like they did before the pandemic."
Since she began her career in banking 31 years ago, Habner said that one of the things that have remained constant is that customer expectations continue to evolve and change:
"They are now buying more things online than ever before, and their expectation of the mobile digital experience is very high. They want their financial services products to operate as seamlessly as their experience with Amazon and Apple, and everybody else. And then I would say as we think about how we deliver our products and services to our customers, it's much more about meeting them where they are and than expecting them to come to us,' she said.
Keeping women in the game
Although the number of women in the executive ranks has improved greatly over the last three decades, there still needs to be a reckoning over why women leave the workforce when they start a family, Habner said.
"I think there is an element of a social expectation for women to play a bigger role in the life of the family – building a beautiful home and taking care of children and arranging all the things that happen around holidays and vacations. It's just that being the CEO of a home life somehow still seems to fall disproportionately on women. And I think the pull of feeling responsible for those things does weigh on women's minds. So, I think there is a cultural phenomenon there that we haven't fully worked through as a society," she said.
"For a long time, we didn't see a lot of female faces at the top of the ladder. And now they are seeing
She urges women to regard their career as a highway and not a race. "There are moments in your career when you can really put your foot on the gas, you're in the fast lane and you're able to prioritize other moments in your career. And maybe it's when you're just having children for the first time, or taking care of an aging parent or if you have a passion outside of work that you want to pursue. So you need to shift down to the middle lane or the slower lane for a while, and then move back on," she advised.
She stressed that it's important for women to get to their destination at a pace that works for them: "You have to pace yourself and take a pitstop and refuel to take care of your physical and mental health. It is a stamina thing. I look at people who succeed in the long run in this business, and they take care of themselves."
Habner, however, cautions women not to leave the workforce. "My advice, honestly, to women is to not exit. It's better to downshift than to leave." She noted that there are pathways back, but it's much harder than it used to be: "Things change so fast and at a speed we haven't seen before, so if you've been out for five years, everything is different. Especially on the technology front."
Leadership lessons
Having led teams for three decades, Habner said that evolving as a leader has been the result of taking risks by switching jobs and functions. "When you bet on yourself, and you get out of your comfort zone and do something completely different, that's when you learn the most and grow your career."
She also said that successful leaders know how to balance the short term and the long term.
"I call this kind of keeping your nose to the grindstone and eyes on the horizon. There is just no replacement for delivering consistent results ahead of your plan, and delivering excellence year after year after year. But the leaders who really progress are ones that can achieve that while also looking at the industry and seeing trends and anticipating trends."
She acknowledged that it's a tricky balance to attain. "Some leaders are great executors and have more of a difficult time taking up their periscope to understand trends, while there are others who are strategists and they live in the future world and have a harder time rallying the troops to actually drive results. If you can be the best of both those worlds, it's a leadership skill that will serve you incredibly well."
Good leaders are "boundaryless," Habner added. "By that, I mean to not be afraid to color outside the lines. When you take a new job, it's somewhat defined for you – here are your roles and responsibilities. And there's a box around what your job is, and it will take you some time to really grasp that and deliver. But the leaders that succeed redefine the lines of responsibility. They see an opportunity and they go for it."
Being a lifelong learner is a role that everyone should embrace at all stages and roles of their career, Habner added. "You have to have a growth mindset. For example, I'm going to bring somebody into my staff meeting and to talk to us about generative AI, which I don't know anything about. But it's something I need to learn about because it's so transformational to our society and to our businesses. I've got to be educated and I need my team to be educated."
