A decade after a former Citigroup financial advisor said the firm first cut off her access to its stock allocation system, she received vindication in the form of a FINRA arbitration award.
Erin Ann Daly won an award of more than $1.4 million from Citigroup Global Markets and other Citi entities for compensatory damages plus interest and attorney fees — along with an expungement of her U5 termination disclosure — after a New York panel ruled on June 24 that the firm had violated the section of the Civil Rights Act prohibiting discrimination in employment. The award also held Citi liable for breaching its own code of conduct and New York state laws against harassment and a hostile work environment, as well as a law forbidding retaliation.
“The termination explanation shall be deleted in its entirety and shall be replaced with the following language: ‘In a decision on Ms. Daly’s gender discrimination and defamation claims, an arbitration panel has found that she was illegally discharged.’” the award stated. “The panel recommends expungement based on the defamatory nature of the information.”
The striking language taking Citi to task for its treatment of Daly came on the same day as the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 case that affirmed women’s rights to abortions. Citi led other megabanks as the first to pledge to pay travel costs for any employee needing to cross state lines for reproductive health care. Its CEO, Jane Fraser, received American Banker’s Most Powerful Woman in Banking Award last year after becoming the first woman named chief of a major U.S. bank. However, the arbitration award offered a reminder of the industry’s legacy as a “boys club,” as Daly’s lawsuit put it. To this day, fewer than a quarter of planners are women.
The firm still denies Daly’s allegations, though. It may seek to vacate the decision in court, where she’ll have to seek confirmation of the award and the company will have a small chance of getting a reversal of the decision.
“As we have maintained for the last six years, we do not believe Ms. Daly’s claims have any merit,” spokeswoman Danielle Romero-Apsilos said in a statement. “We disagree with this decision and will explore our options.”
Daly’s attorney didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the decision. She hasn’t been registered with any firm since 2014 and first filed a federal lawsuit in 2016 only to have it ordered into FINRA arbitration two years later,
She had alleged in her lawsuit that the promising start to her career which included accomplishments like the CEO Award for Excellence in 2012, ran into the proverbial glass ceiling. In June 2012, she found that her entire identification for Citi Private Bank’s stock allocation system had been deleted, according to the lawsuit. Citi “deliberately prevented” Daly from getting the functionality back “because she is female,” the lawsuit said. When she reported the conduct, she learned that she could only keep her job by apologizing, according to the lawsuit. She then became a “glorified secretary,” the lawsuit stated. She alleged that the firm fired her after she reported a supervisor who “constantly harassed” her for “protected inside information so that he could pass the information along to his favored clients,” the suit shows.
“This exclusion from her business functionality resulted in loss of opportunity and is a result of Citi’s ‘boys’ club’ policies and practices which underlie a culture of gender discrimination,” according to the lawsuit. “The gender disparity is most clearly evidenced by the deliberate exclusion of females on the desk from allocating stock or even being able to view the full ‘book’ which is the itemized and summarized description of the involved parties, their respective interest and finally allocation on each deal. This systematic exclusion of females from any real functionality resulted and continues to result in diminished client contact, opportunity for advancement and pigeonholing into service, administrative and secretarial roles for females.”
Three years after a federal judge upheld Citi’s motion to compel arbitration and dismiss her whistleblower claim in 2018, Daly filed the arbitration claim against the firm. The original April 2021 claim included allegations of retaliation under the Civil Rights Act, violations of Dodd-Frank’s whistleblower protection provisions and “blacklisting” or interference with a prospective employment relationship. The three-member panel dismissed those claims this past April in a partial ruling in favor of Citi’s motion to toss the whole case. In the claim, she sought reimbursement for lost earnings, double back pay, damages for “mental anguish, loss of dignity, humiliation and injury to livelihood,” among other requests.
Citi denied the allegations and asked the panel to order Daly to pay “the reasonable costs and disbursements incurred in defending this proceeding.” In an evidentiary hearing last month, it imposed a sanction of $200 against Daly after the arbitrators ruled that she had tried to introduce additional documents “resulting in an unnecessary executive session.”
In nearly every other possible way, they unanimously ruled for Daly. The award comes with 3.25% interest and, due to the New York State Human Rights Law, $42,000 in attorney fees. In addition, the panel approved the removal of the December 2014 termination explanation filed on Daly’s Form U5. Daly can now get the statements removed from her permanent record after forwarding a copy of the award to FINRA’s Credentialing, Registration, Education and Disclosure Department for review. The 2016 lawsuit cited the language that she says the firm used to explain her dismissal.
At the time, the firm alleged there were “concerns that included tardiness and insubordination in connection with working hours; concerns about a separate incident in which the representative forwarded confidential information about a planned offering to a co-worker, without providing notice and receiving appropriate approvals within the firm, even though such notice and pre-approval were required by firm policy; and concerns about representative’s responses to certain firm questions.”
The firm’s conduct toward her essentially ended Daly’s career, according to the lawsuit.
“Citi’s deliberate discriminatory acts towards Erin because she is a woman directly resulted in diminished client contact and interaction, marginalization, and reduced her commercial opportunities down to zero,” the lawsuit stated. “Citi’s deliberate exclusion of Erin from her normal business function, and her exclusion from meetings with upper management discredited her to her peers and her clients and ultimately destroyed her professional career.”
In a bitter irony, Daly had joined Citi and Smith Barney, a firm made infamous more than 25 years ago by the “Boom-Boom Room” lawsuit and a trailblazing book called “Tales from the Boom-Boom Room” by journalist Susan Antilla, in 2007, according to the lawsuit. She later moved to Citi Personal Wealth Management and “rose again within Citigroup” to the private bank before being appointed an assistant vice president with the unit in 2010, the lawsuit states.