A handsome performance by the division that contains Citigroup's Delaware operations helped counterbalance a lackluster quarter in some of the bank's other businesses and helped pull the third-biggest bank of the nation into the black for the first time after the financial crisis.

Fourth-quarter net income of the bank remained at $1.31 billion, or four cents per share, compared to a $7.58 billion loss, or thirty three cents, in the same period in 2009. The profit was less than what had been foretold, eight analysts had predicted in a Bloomberg survey that Citigroup would post a per-share profit of seven cents.

While the bank saw fewer losses from loans, allowing it to take money out of reserves, fluctuations in the bond market had affected its fourth-quarter earnings.

Citi employs about one thousand five hundred people in Delaware. With most of them working in its Global Transaction Services division, which is a unit that offers integrated treasury and trade solutions and securities and fund services to financial institutions, multinational corporations and the public sector around the world.

While revenues from Transaction Services' worldwide were $2.6 billion which is a rise of one percent from the earlier quarter, its business declined in North America. Worldwide Transaction Services posted eight hundred and sixty eight million dollars in profit, down from nine hundred and twenty million dollars in the previous quarter and nine hundred and ten million dollars at the end of 2009.

The company posted an over all earnings of $10.6 billion in 2010 which mark the first profitable year under Vikram Pandit, the Chief Executive Officer aged 54. Pandit took the post in the month of December of 2007 and steered the bank to losses amounting to $29.3 billion during the next two years.