Two Months After Charles "Chuck" Prince was named chief executive of Citigroup in July, 2003, investment bankers came calling. Would Prince be interested in selling one of the last vestiges of Travelers Group, the business merged with Citicorp in 1998 to form Citigroup in a $72 billion deal—at the time the largest merger in U.S. history? The answer, predictably, was no. Prince wasn't due to move into the CEO suite until December and was not about to start dismantling the empire that took his longtime patron and boss, Sanford I. "Sandy" Weill, 18 years to build. Under Weill, Citigroup and its predecessors were voracious acquirers, and Prince was along for the whole ride. "I remember very fondly the days when, every two or three years, we would change the name of the company—Commercial Credit, Primerica, Travelers," Prince told BusinessWeek. "That was the force that got us here. But the days of doing big consolidating transactions that completely transformed the company are behind us."
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