Chief Executive Officer of the banking group Citigroup Inc. Vikram Pandit plans to appoint John Havens as president and chief operating officer (COO) as part of a structural reform to support the bank's recovery from the financial crisis.

Havens, 54, has been head of Citi's institutional clients group for three years. His appointment will reduce the workload on Pandit, who currently has 18 top managers directly subordinate to him. From now on, Havens will share a number of responsibilities with the CEO, notes The Wall Street Journal .

As it became known the day before, Citi received a net profit of $1.3 billion in the fourth quarter of 2010 against a loss of $7.6 billion a year earlier, but the reporting turned out to be worse than analysts' forecasts and 11% lower than the figure for the third quarter. The price of the bank's securities on American exchanges fell by 6.4%.

At the end of 2010, Citigroup received a net profit of $10.602 billion, or 35 cents per share, against a loss of $1.606 billion, or 80 cents per share, a year earlier. Revenue grew by 8% to $86.601 billion.

The announced personnel changes in the bank's top management turned out to be the largest since Pandit took over as CEO in December 2007. However, experts say that no radical changes in Citi’s development strategy should be expected; Havens and Pandit have been working in the same team for a long time and have similar views on the group’s development path.

They met 25 years ago while working at Morgan Stanley, which they simultaneously left in 2005 due to a conflict in the bank's management.

Citigroup will appoint a new bank president