Profile: Citibank's regional marketing boss Francesco Lagutaine

"I'm a man of contradictions," jokes Francesco Lagutaine, the chief marketing officer of Citibank Asia-Pacific. "This explains why I work in banking where I do very little of what I was trained to do."

The Italian, who rides a 1969 Vespa to his Singapore office, began his career in advertising with Lowe. It was an industry he chanced upon by accident after looking for a job in business, but the law school graduate now believes that advertising was a vital foundation for the career he has built today.

"I had the privilege of working with Jeff Goodby and Rich Silverstein. I was running the Pepsi account then and when I had to change lines in the copy, I had to go to Jeff Goodby. As a young account director, you learn the trade very quickly that way."

The 41-year-old reveals that dealing with significant strategic issues for clients at a young age both intrigued and shaped him. "You deal with mission critical issues and business strategy. You deal with people who are out of your league and you're always the youngest person in the room by decades," says Lagutaine.

Success came at a cost for Lagutaine. His aptitude saw him promoted to a senior agency management role, but he missed being closely involved in the creative process.

"I started realising that my client was spending more time with the work - talking about customers and insights, about shaping the products - than I was. So when Citibank offered me the opportunity to go to the client side. I jumped at it and I've loved it ever since," he says.

Lagutaine joined Citibank in 2005 and, two years later, was part of the team that developed and relaunched Citi's brand across 43 markets. Before his current appointment, he was based in New York as VP of global marketing, responsible for strategic communication outside the US.

"Managing marketing communications at a global level gave me a good understanding of our business in Asia," he says. "The region was already a significant part of our international operations."

Lagutaine describes his first year as a very long and very short one, due to the global financial meltdown. Yet he notes that Citibank still has a strong franchise in Asia and a "great" and "premium" brand that was resilient through the crisis.

For the future, Lagutaine's key focus is Citi's customers as he works to turn the bank into a "customer-centric" one.

"It's an exciting process for my company and me," he says. "We need to create products that meet customer needs. While my role is marketing and customer experience, every department has to be involved. That's part of what is the new frontier of marketing."

Lagutaine is determined to get to grips with what many deem as experiential marketing. "We need to position ourselves as an affluent service provider and to benchmark ourselves with the Ritz-Carltons and the Singapore Airlines of the world," he says. "It's not a like-for-like comparison in terms of product, but it should be like-for-like in terms of customer experience."

To better reach his customers, Lagutaine's marketing communications strategy is looking at multiple channels. He describes both traditional and non-traditional out of home advertising as offering a big opportunity and says that Citibank is strong in digital acquisition.

When it comes to agency partners, Lagutaine is happy that Citi has long-term relationships with Publicis and MEC. However, he notes that true integration, something, which he aims for in his own internal teams, has yet to fully come to pass.

"The industry, our agency partners and ourselves, we are all trying to find the balance, and redefine the business that has served the marketing communication needs of companies for so long,"

Lagutaine says. "We should work as a truly integrated team. For example, in my job, I work very closely with people in the product unit, in technology, and in sales."

Lagutaine believes that partly due to the size of some agencies, their heritage and their culture, they are still operating in what he terms silos. "Some are struggling to cross the boundaries and that's where I think the challenges will be moving forward," he says.

Francesco Lagutaine's CV

2009 Chief marketing officer, Asia-Pacific, Citibank
2005 Vice-president, global marketing, Citibank
2003 Senior partner, global account director, Ogilvy & Mather New York
1999 Global account director, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners
1998 Account director, HHCL+P
1994 Account director, Saatchi & Saatchi London
1993 Account supervisor, Saatchi & Saatchi Frankfurt, Germany
1992 Account executive, Lowe & Partners Frankfurt

This article was originally published in the 15 July 2010 issue of Media.