Enter the quiet giant

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: He was, until last week, arguably the greatest financial-services chief executive who never was. In 2002, when Bob Willumstad was picked as president of Citigroup by Sandy Weill, his longtime boss, it was widely deemed to be his anointment as heir-apparent. A year later, however, Mr Willumstad was passed over for the top job in favour of Chuck Prince, whom Mr Weill considered better placed to deal with the financial giant’s post-dotcom regulatory woes. After a couple of years as operations chief Mr Willumstad threw in the towel, saying he wanted his own shot at running a big public company. Offers trickled in, but nothing materialised. He wound up at another financial giant, American International Group (AIG), the world’s largest insurer, but only as non-executive chairman. And had it not been for the credit crunch he might have seen out the rest of his career in that job, his potential unfulfilled.

On June 15th Mr Willumstad was hastily installed as chief executive of AIG, following the forced resignation of Martin Sullivan after only three years at the helm. The change comes at a perilous time for the company, though for the 62-year-old it may yet prove to be a prime turnaround opportunity. AIG’s undoing has been its bulging book of credit-default swaps, written to protect clients holding mortgage-linked securities. As this credit soured, AIG was hit by a wave of write-downs, sending it deep into loss and forcing it to raise $20 billion of fresh capital. Shareholders, outraged by this reckless departure from AIG’s core business of property, casualty, vehicle and life policies, demanded a shake-up. None was more vocal than Mr Sullivan’s predecessor, Hank Greenberg, who turned AIG into a global powerhouse with annual revenues of $100 billion during his 37 years at the top, before being edged out amid an accounting probe in 2005.