Deborah Hopkins, US-listed bank Citi’s chief innovation officer and CEO of Citi Ventures, its corporate venturing unit, will retire at the end of the year.
Hopkins founded and built Citi Ventures and is part of the succession planning being currently carried out. She is expected to establish her own advisory firm, increase her board service and lend her support to various women’s initiatives.
Hopkins joined Citi in 2003 as head of strategy, becoming chief operations and technology officer two years later. In 2008, she was given the new role of chief innovation officer – one of the first with the title globally and for which she won the GCV award in January – and Hopkins has served as Citi Ventures’ CEO since it was launched in Palo Alto, California, at the start of the decade as a way to connect Citi to the entrepreneurial and high-tech ecosystem in Silicon Valley.
This pioneering combination of chief innovation officer and head of ventures has become a model peers across industry sectors and beyond the US have looked to for inspiration, according to the description for the GCV Powerlist 2016, which said: “Hopkins will be able to look back on more than a decade at the bank with great pride.”
In discussing her retirement, Hopkins said: “The skill in the role is being insanely passionate about the outcome. To keep pivoting, tweaking to be most relevant for our audience, which is nearly a quarter of a million of very bright people at Citi. We have to be accelerating impact and having the potential to scale.”
For the Powerlist award received last month, she said: “With more than 10 new companies added to our portfolio in the past year, we see beyond individual transactions, and invest in ideas that can improve all aspects of our customer and client experience. Through our venture investing efforts and global lab network, we are reimagining the next generation of human-centric financial services with the goal of setting the standard for the future of banking, and driving a new growth agenda for Citi.”
Hopkins’ experience prior to joining Citi has much to do with her success over the past decade, Heidi Mason, co-founder at Bell Mason Group, an adviser to Hopkins, said. She has previously worked in the automotive, aerospace and telecoms industries with stints at companies from General Motors and Boeing to Lucent and Unisys.
“Her unique operating background reads like a preparatory roadmap for this new kind of role and especially at this time,” Mason explained for the Powerlist award. “Her leadership is enabled by the unique and diverse nature of her background and skills accumulation, and how they all come together with a natural instinct for innovation strategy and vision of implementation that are so integral to the chief innovation officer role.”
Naturally, Hopkins’ achievements have resonated far beyond the walls of Citi and Global Corporate Venturing. Fortune has twice named her among the most powerful women in US business and she has been on the Institutional Investor’s Top 50 list every year since 2011.
Picture credit: Hopkins speaking at the Global Corporate Venturing and Innovation Summit in Sonoma, California, in January 2016.
This article was updated to say Fortune has twice named her among the most powerful women in US business and she has been on the Institutional Investor’s Top 50 list every year since 2011.