Citi PR campaign continues

Citigroup (C), perhaps a bit more quietly than Goldman Sachs (GS), is on something of a PR campaign itself. It's getting CEO Vikram Pandit out into the farther domestic reaches of what's still a large, near-national bank. The company lines up the local media whenever it ventures out and then has been a bit less cynical.

The latest trip was to St. Louis, where the St. Louis Post Dispatch duly noted, "In an interview, Pandit said the mortgage unit, which accounts for most of Citigroup's 5,800 Missouri employees, has been growing and adding staff recently, in part to deal with foreclosure prevention. Part of the prevention effort, Pandit said, involves proactively contacting homeowners before they get too far behind in their payments. CitiMortgage also uses information from Citi's credit-card unit to flag homeowners who may be headed for financial trouble. Since 2007, CitiMortgage has helped 715,000 people keep their homes instead of losing them to foreclosure."

That kind of good press will be hard to get from the national or international media. Pandit then met with students at Washington University to speak about responsible finance and did an interview with the student paper. These are modest PR wins, but they are wins. They certainly feels better than that first question from CNN International.

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