Honeymoon period runs out for Citigroup's new chief executive Pandit

Evelyn Y Davis, the bullying, screeching scourge of annual shareholders' meetings in the US, was in particularly feisty form at the Citigroup gathering in New York last month.

Unlike at most of the meetings she haunts, the septuagenarian shareholder activist was not alone in hectoring Citigroup's chief executive, Vikram Pandit – the rest of the shareholders greeted several of his comments with boos and jeers – but she did have one of the best lines of the event. "You, Vikram, I am going to call you The Student Prince, because you are student of banking," she said.

Mr Pandit, 51, is a Wall Street veteran, but he has never worked in, much less run, a retail bank, which is one of Citigroup's major businesses, along with investment banking and private wealth management.

This financial conglomerate is reeling from $40bn (£20bn) of losses on sub-prime mortgages, the crisis that ended the career of Mr Pandit's predecessor Chuck Prince and pitched him into the top job last December. The group has been hunting for cash to replace that lost money, and it is still to address years of bloated costs built up in the retail banking side. All this at a time when shareholders are questioning whether it shouldn't in fact be broken up.

It is the biggest job in US banking, but Mr Pandit's performance on the podium last month was decidedly small. Beyond saying he was "excited", he greeted most shareholders' questions with platitudes. A gathering dissatisfaction with his nascent leadership manifested itself, explosively, on the front page of The Wall Street Journal earlier this week and suddenly this morning's "investor day" looks critical to Mr Pandit's reputation.

Supporters say his cautious approach is exactly what a complex behemoth like Citigroup needs. Under his leadership, the group has shed minor businesses including the Diners Club International credit card division; announced a number of redundancy schemes in individual businesses; cut the dividend by 41 per cent and raised some $9bn in new capital in the past two weeks. He has resurrected an old marketing slogan ("The Citi never sleeps"); sent a co-head of investment banking to live in Dubai to symbolise the importance of emerging markets to future growth; and poached Terri Dial from Lloyds TSB to run the retail bank. He has also rejigged internal business divisions, but Sally Krawcheck, who runs Citi's wealth management business, warned him that his new structure could cause "paralysis", according to Wall Street gossip.

Even his friends seem exasperated. Sandy Weill, the former chief executive who created Citigroup through a string of mergers, told the Journal that Mr Pandit needed to use his position to enthuse shareholders. "The leader needs to relate to the people," he said. "They need to know who they're following."

That is what today's investor meeting is aimed at doing, setting out the results of Mr Pandit's five-month review of the business, with analysts speculating it will reveal details of incremental job cuts, financial targets for the coming years and give some clarity on whether Citigroup is done raising emergency funds and on whether the dividend is safe.

But Marshall Front, a Chicago-based fund manager at Front Barnett Associates, which has Citigroup shares among its holdings, cautioned against hoping that Mr Pandit will "draw back the curtain and reveal his 'vision' for the company". "I'm trying to make the best of a poor communications situation," he said. "And it has been poor. Mr Pandit does not have that commanding presence, but maybe Citigroup has had enough of that. He is an analyst, a shrewd man, and he is looking at the bank piece by piece. Frankly, I applaud him so far, but people are going to continue to nag about what Citigroup is going to look like in a few years and what he is going to do for shareholders."

Wall Street is a harsh examiner. The Student Prince must graduate with honours today.