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Scale and Scope at Citigroup
Revised: August 28, 2002
Citigroup Chairman and CEO Sanford "Sandy" Weill reflected on a long, successful
career in which he built one of the built one of the largest and most profitable financial
service companies in the world. His strategy had always been growth through
acquisition, consistently increasing his firm's size, product scope, and geographic range.
But now he wondered: Should he continue to expand, or should he follow the lead of
many of his competitors and focus on Citigroup's most successful businesses?
Citigroup and Its Precursors
Citigroup, with its coveted single-letter ticker symbol C, is the result of the 1998 merger
of Citicorp and the Travelers Group. The merger broke new ground in combining
commercial banking, investment banking, and insurance under one roof for the first time
in the US since federal legislation forced their separation in the 1930s.
Citicorp was incorporated as the City Bank of New York in 1812, became National City
Bank of New York in 1865, and was renamed Citicorp in 1974. At the dawn of the
twentieth century, the bank followed its corporate customers abroad, opening branches in
Europe (London in 1902, Genoa in 1916, Petrograd in 1917!), South America (Buenos
Aires in 1914, Rio de Janeiro and Montevideo in 1915), and Asia (Shanghai and
Singapore in 1902). The result was the most extensive international branch network of
any American bank at the time. The bank's president wrote to the chairman at the close
of 1915: "We are really becoming a world bank in a very broad sense, and I am perfectly
confident that the way is open to us to become the most powerful, the most serviceable, ...