Chief Innovation Officer, Citi; Lead, Citi Ventures
Vanessa Colella is Citi’s Chief Innovation Officer and leads the Citi Ventures and Citi Productivity teams. Vanessa’s goal is to accelerate and discover new sources of value by championing innovation so that Citi can compete more effectively in a world of technological, behavioral, and societal change. The Citi Ventures team drives innovation by exploring, incubating, and investing in new ideas and partnering with category-defining startups to help people, business and communities thrive. The Citi Productivity team works to transform the employee experience by leveraging the power of process simplification, operating model redesign, and new technologies to help Citi increase efficiency and effectiveness.
Before becoming Chief Innovation Officer, Vanessa led venture investing and D10X for Citi Ventures, and ran marketing for Citi’s North American Consumer Bank. She joined Citibank in 2010 from U.S. Venture Partners, where she was an entrepreneur-in-residence. Prior, Vanessa was Head of NA Marketing and SVP of Insights at Yahoo, where she was responsible for developing and executing the consumer data strategy. She was previously a Partner at McKinsey & Company.
Vanessa received her masters’ degrees from Columbia University and M.I.T. as well as a Ph.D. from M.I.T.’s Media Lab.