Citigroup's head of corporate and investment banking, Tony Osmond, said inquiries the bank was fielding suggested boards, management teams and shareholders had learnt from the mistakes of the past and had a "better sense" of getting offshore deals right.

"We get the feeling the tide is going to change on this," he said in an interview. "Balance sheets are strong and there is now a growth bias and shareholders are supportive of strong listed companies coming out and doing things offshore."

Disastrous international forays by companies such as Foster's Group and National Australia Bank have tainted investor expectations of local companies executing deals in new markets. But more recently companies such as hospital group Ramsay Health Care, jobs website company SEEK and packaging group Amcor have been applauded for bulking up in markets outside Australia.

Citigroup's head of general industrials and financial sponsors, Aidan Allen, said while there was a lot of focus on local companies expanding in Asia, often the execution of those strategies were "very difficult".

"I would say about 30 per cent to 50 per cent of the dialogue we are having with our good strategic clients is around opportunities that are US-related in some way, shape or form," Mr Allen said.

Organic growth a struggle

Managing director Nick Bagot said while many local companies had benefited in the past year from margin improvement and cheaper funding, organic earnings-per-share growth would become more difficult.

"We need more News Corps and more Westfields stepping out for the sake of our local market and the amount of super fund money invested in our local market," Mr Bagot said.

According to Dealogic data, takeovers worth $US72.6 billion ($82.6 billion) were announced in the nine months to September 30, including domestic, inbound and outbound deals. Outbound transactions accounted for almost 15 per cent.

Although Citigroup's bankers point out they don't focus on league tables, they rank fifth in the year to date for advising on deals. In the past seven years, they have only finished in the top five for merger advisory work in two other years.

Mr Osmond joined Citigroup four years ago from Goldman Sachs, bringing Mr Bagot across with him and poaching Mr Allen from UBS, who started in his role about a year ago.

Admitting there have been challenges along the way, Mr Osmond labels the last four years a "resounding success" in terms of attracting and retaining key staff.

"We don't focus on league tables but it is nice to look back and say we've been involved in the largest deals," he said, noting that Citigroup's strategy focused on key clients coming to the bank first, and that was what employees were internally measured on.

"It is challenging building a business and trying to grow clients and retain existing ones . . . And you have to remember that the financial and business services market was effectively in recession during 2013."

Privatisation wave coming

Citigroup advised on Hong Kong's Cheung Kong Group's acquisition of gas distributor Envestra and also jointly tended to AGL Energy in its protracted purchase of Macquarie Generation.

In equity capital markets, Citigroup worked with Goldman Sachs on the mammoth Woodside Petroleum block trade and on floats such as Spotless Group. However, the firm did miss out on a coveted role on the privatisation of Medibank Private.

Citigroup, like its rivals, is positioning for a swathe of state and federal government privatisations in the next two years.

On Wednesday, it informed staff that it had hired Morgan Stanley's David Paton as a senior member of the energy, power and infrastructure team. Mr Paton will report to Philip Graham, the Asia-Pacific boss of the division who is based in Sydney.

"I think it is going to be a pretty decent year in 2015," he said referring to the $50 billion of slated state government privatisations in the energy sector. "There are also a lot of non-privatisation deals where the assets are owned by the wrong owners."

Mr Allen noted that private equity firms were poised for further local transactions, and that Citigroup's local business was scalable.

He was also mindful that Australia had not kept pace with the 34 per cent jump on merger activity occurring globally this year with deals of $US2.8 trillion, and the highest first-nine-month volume since 2007. Australian volumes rose 27 per cent over the same period.