Enter the quiet giant

Font Size

Print

Feedback

Email

Discuss

: one of Citi’s main engines of profit, largely thanks to tight cost control.

He seems to have ruffled very few feathers along the way. Former colleagues put this down to a combination of unobtrusiveness and honesty. “He’s quiet but very effective,” says Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, who worked alongside Mr Willumstad at Citi. “You get the truth with him. There’s no political agenda.” Many Citibankers had hoped he would return to take the top job when Mr Prince resigned last November. (The board approached him but eventually plumped for Vikram Pandit.) These qualities set the “quiet giant”, as the six-foot-three Mr Willumstad was once dubbed, in contrast to the blokeish Mr Sullivan and the imperious

Mr Greenberg. Known as a consensus-builder, he is not given to impetuousness—unless you count donning an Elvis Presley wig at his 55th birthday party. But he knows time is against him. He has launched a 90-day review of all group operations, including its scrutiny of financial controls, promising that there will be “no sacred cows”.

Might the man who helped build America’s largest bank now dismantle its largest insurer? Some think that, like Citi, AIG has become too complex for anyone to run. Candidates for divestment could include part or all of the consumer-finance, capital markets, aircraft-leasing or fund-management businesses—though the last of these fits well with AIG’s insurance operations. Mr Willumstad was certainly not shy about selling bits of Citi. But he remains a believer in the financial-supermarket model. And he is wise enough not to sell in a market trough unless he has to. For all the tough talk, “the big cows will probably stay on the farm,” says Andrew Kligerman, an analyst with UBS.

Board senseless

In the meantime, a host of other problems are weighing on the firm.