SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — Citigroup Inc. built up a big pile of cash in the wake of the financial crisis and now the financial-services giant is ready to put this money to work making loans and repaying debt, Chief Financial Officer John Gerspach said Tuesday.

Citi C, +2.01% reported fourth-quarter earnings that missed analyst expectations earlier on Tuesday, sending the stock down more than 5%. Read about the results here.

During a conference call, Rochdale Securities bank analyst Richard Bove questioned why Citi has so much cash squirreled away earning little interest.

Citi had $190.4 billion in cash and deposits with banks at the end of 2010. The company also had a net positive position in the Federal Funds market of $57 billion. Money is either borrowed or loaned overnight in this market, so it can be converted into cash very quickly.

Taken together, this left Citi with $247.6 billion in cash, which equals 12.9% of the bank’s $1.91 trillion in assets, according to Bove.

“This is possibly an all-time record but I am sure that in the Depression the ratio was higher,” Bove wrote in an email to MarketWatch.

In contrast, J.P. Morgan Chase JPM, +1.28% had about $90 billion of cash and deposits with banks at the end of 2010. The bank also had a negative Federal Funds position of about $65 billion. This is on an asset base of just over $2 trillion.

Gerspach, Citi’s CFO, admitted during Tuesday’s conference call that the company has a lot of cash on its balance sheet.

Citi also has a lot of long-term debt maturing in 2011 and the bank will use some of its cash pile to repay some of that.

Citi will also use some of the cash to make more loans, Gerspach added.

“We are open for business and we are looking for — we are looking to build a loan book both in our consumer and our corporate businesses,” he said, according to a transcript of the conference call.

“So it’s fair to state that if you start to utilize that excess cash to lend and if your loan-to-deposit ratio starts to move up, I am going to say again, to more normal levels that this represents tremendous excess earnings capacity at the moment?” Bove asked

”Yes, our deposit-to-loan ratio, I tend to think of it the other way right now, is about 139% or 140%,” Gerspach replied. “That is higher than we would expect to be on a long-term basis.”