Bob Annibale's corner office, high up in one of London's few real skyscrapers, overlooks the Thames and the Millennium Dome from one window, Greenwich Park and the Royal Observatory from another. It is the kind of enviable perch you'd expect Citigroup's senior treasury risk manager to enjoy. But that is the job Annibale left three years ago; now he is Citi's "Global Director of Microfinance".

Microfinance, the system of providing tiny loans and savings accounts to the poor, seems an unlikely and somewhat ironic candidate for Citigroup's attention. It was because banks weren't interested in serving the poor that the pioneers of microfinance saw a gap to be filled, back in the 1970s.