The Big Interview: Jim Adams

Former barman, construction worker and clothes shop assistant Jim Adams only went into technology so he could “be in the dry and warm.”

Starting his career as a teenage data processor, he wound up as Group CTO at Citibank after a distinguished career at Goldman, then Deutsche Bank as CTO, Global Markets and JP Morgan before landing at Citi; pretty dry, pretty warm. 

Adams, who left Citi in 2024 after serving nearly five years as CTO and head of the bank's technology infrastructure group, has spent his time after standing down distilling his experience into "The Creative CTO."

The UK-native turned New York-resident hopes that the book can be a toolkit for aspiring technology leaders navigating the complexities of enterprise transformation – which can, at Citi scale, be immense. 

At the bank he oversaw technology for approximately 12,000 people.

Sitting down at an exclusive event by The Stack, he says that "At Citi, I'm pretty sure just about everybody in the organization knew what our strategy was, knew why we were doing it, knew how we were doing it." 

That wasn't the case everywhere...