Sanford I. Weill

Sanford I. Weillis an American financier and philanthropist whose company, Travelers Group, merged with Citicorp to form Citigroup in 1998—the largest merger in history at the time.

Weill was born to Polish immigrants and was the first in his family to earn a college degree, graduating from Cornell University in 1955. Afterward, he worked his way up from Wall Street messenger to stockbroker to cofounder of Carter, Berlind, Potoma & Weill, a small brokerage firm, in 1960. During the next two decades, Weill aggressively bought securities houses and amassed his first financial services network, Shearson Loeb Rhoades. His steady rise came to a halt, however, in the 1980s, when he sold Shearson to American Express. He served as president of American Express for a short time, but in 1985 he left the company.

At that time, in his 50s and financially secure, Weill would not have been begrudged his retirement. Instead he started over, buying the Commercial Credit division of Control Data Corporation in 1986. It was not an auspicious rebirth of an empire, as the small division was a faltering reject of its parent company. Weill, however, displayed a talent for rebuilding such organizations through cost cutting and employee motivation, and two years later he was expanding again, merging Commercial Credit with the larger, but struggling, Primerica and acquiring the securities firm Smith Barney in the process. The new company, using the name Primerica, acquired Travelers Insurance and repurchased Shearson from American Express during 1992–93. Primerica then renamed itself Travelers Group.

In 1996 Weill expanded Travelers Group when he bought the casualty and property insurance businesses of the Aetna Life and Casualty Company. In October 1997 he gained widespread attention for Travelers Group’s $9 billion purchase of Salomon Inc., parent company of the prestigious Salomon Brothers investment bank. It was at the time the second largest acquisition in Wall Street history. But, even as Weill’s comeback was hailed on Wall Street, he still sought the greater size and diversity that a merger with Citicorp, the largest American bank, would bring. The huge, international, and diversified financial services institution that would be created through the merger of the Travelers Group and Citicorp was what he had been dreaming about for more than a decade. When the proposed merger was announced in April 1998, the news stunned the financial industry, but the decision was in step with Weill’s reputation as a corporate visionary who was as savvy as he was fearless.

The completion of the merger was stalled, however, because of the Glass-Steagall Act, a Great Depression-era law that prohibited banks from selling insurance. To overcome this obstacle, Weill and Citicorp Chairman John S. Reed initiated a lobbying campaign to fully repeal the act, something that U.S. financial companies had been attempting to do for decades. Meanwhile, they were able to secure a waiver that allowed the two companies to merge temporarily. In 1999 the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act was signed into law; it repealed the barriers of the Glass-Steagall Act. Thus, the merger was able to be completed, and in 1999 Weill became cochairman and co-CEO of Citigroup, then the largest financial services company in the world.

By 2000 Weill was the sole chairman and CEO of Citigroup. Under his leadership the company experienced unprecedented growth, and subsidiaries were acquired in Asia and eastern Europe. Weill stepped down as CEO in 2003 and as chairman in 2006. Following his retirement, he concentrated on his longtime philanthropic endeavours, including the National Academy Foundation, a network of career academies for high school students, which he had founded in 1982. Weill also raised money to renovate Carnegie Hall in New York City, and he had endowed the medical school at his alma mater, Cornell University. In 2009 Weill and his wife were awarded the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy, named for Andrew Carnegie, the millionaire industrialist and philanthropist.