Citibank chief executive, Mr Aidan Brady, is an unlikely figure, in so far as he is a banker bearing good news. At a time when the sector is taking a hammering from ordinary customers, the Revenue Commissioners and the Government, the US bank has hogged all the positive publicity lately.

Just a week after AIB senior executives faced an intensive grilling at the Dail Public Account's Committee over bogus non-resident accounts, Mr Brady found himself in the spotlight, lining up with the Taoiseach and Tanaiste to announce plans to recruit an extra 1,300 employees for its flagship processing and services operation at Dublin's International Financial Services Centre. Just three years earlier, it made a similar announcement bringing 1,000 people on board.

The bank, it seems, can't get enough of Ireland. Its latest job creation plan will bring its total investment here to £100 million.

The new centre will handle the back office administration and processing for Citibank's fund management and banking activities throughout Europe.

The only fly in the ointment will be whether Citibank can actually find 1,300 staff to take up the new jobs in a sector which is plagued by high staff turnover.

Despite this problem, Mr Brady is confident the jobs will be filled. "Call centres everywhere have had a very rough time and we have had problems in some areas. Our staff turnover is quite high - in line with the rest of the industry - but we are confident we will have less of a problem in holding onto staff than most."

As a foreign bank it has a lot to offer to employees, he claims. "If it was just a pure call centre, involving factory type work where nobody ever saw a customer, it would be horrendous. But even our back office people talk to customers. You are working at a computer screen all day, but you are answering customer queries and questions and it is intellectually stimulating."

The bank's main challenge is to attract the right profile of employees to work at its processing and service operation over the longer term. "The mistake that everybody has made is that they have tended to recruit from the colleges, as most young graduates just want to move on. Next you turn your attention to school leavers. If they manage to get through the rigorous selection process, they are fairly confident about their abilities, so the next stage for them is to move either somewhere else in Citibank or to another company."

Citibank is now endeavouring to offer a package that will provide different opportunities within the bank for new recruits and is hopeful this will stem the outflow of staff from its call centre in the future.

The new recruits will start on a basic salary of around £10,000, relatively low by financial services standards.

"Unfortunately when you talk about the salary, people immediately ask how could you live on £10,000 in this city? In answer to that we have to say the new people are coming in raw. We have to train them for eight weeks and they are relatively ineffective, say for nine months. What do people want? It's a start-off job?"

Mr Brady points out that he started work as a trainee chartered accountant with the large Dublin firm SKC, which now trades as KPMG, where he was paid £1,000 a year.

"Now I think the big firms pay £10,000, but the smaller ones pay £4,000 which puts things in perspective. Our salaries are in line with the market, in fact we try to stay slightly above the market, but we also have to be realistic. It is a processing centre, a services centre and Ireland does not want to price itself out of the business."

In operation in the Republic since 1965, Mr Brady boasts that Citibank was the first international bank to open up for business in the Republic. Its primary motivation was to serve its US client base, as a growing number set up manufacturing operations here in the 1960s.

Some 33 years on, it is still serving the same client base catering for the banking needs of the likes of Intel, Johnson & Johnson, Proctor & Gamble and Coca-Cola. "We have been with them all the way through," Mr Brady says.

"We only deal with very large multinational companies. Years ago we used to try to do everything for everybody. If we had a product we wanted to sell we looked for customers to sell it to, whereas now we invent products for our customers. We have a very clear target market."

Citibank, which is part of the newly merged Citigroup, is one of the world's largest financial services companies. In April the $155 billion (£106 billion) merger between Travelers Group and Citigroup created a company with 100 million corporate and retail customers in 100 countries.

In the Republic, Citibank specialises in providing cash management services to the multinationals, allowing them to move money around to various locations through its electronic banking facilities. "That is our main business with the multinationals as opposed to lending. Most multinationals have lots of cash and don't need loan finance. We have gone away from competing with the likes of AIB and Bank of Ireland for companies who need Irish pounds borrowings. They can do it an awful lot better than we can."

It has also built up substantial business with the Government and the semi-state organisations, and some of the large Irish companies which are players in the international markets.

The steady trickle of accusations of overcharging and claims that some Irish banks facilitated widescale tax evasion for their customers have done little to tarnish the reputation of the sector internationally so far, according to Mr Brady.

"I think that anyone looking in on what is happening in the sector can see it relates to the consumer base. Consumer businesses in any country tend to be the most problematic. Its always hard to get good publicity out of it."

Irish banks are viewed as being extremely good, he says. "As an international bank dealing with lots of banks in many countries, the Irish banks are at the top of the league. They are well managed, focused and make good returns on what they do. They also provide very good competition for us in anything we do and we have a lot of respect for them."

The internationally-owned banks also reserve a high degree of respect for the Central Bank, the regulatory authority which oversees the banking sector, he says. "As a regulator, the Central Bank has a good track record. It must be remembered it had to cope with the establishment of the IFSC and has earned enormous respect in that regard."