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March 2000

We gotta get out of this place...





       
William Shatner
Deutsche Bank's Mary Cirillo and Citigroup's Heidi Miller are good friends. They're also two of the most senior women in banking in the US. At least they used to be. For on the last Wednesday in February both of them resigned, and both are looking at e-commerce for their next step. It's a big change for both. And their departures are indicative of what DLJ analyst Joan Solatar calls "one of the industry's biggest challenges - the loss of intellectual capital to dot coms and venture capital firms".
Only Miller has a job to go to thus far. In making the leap, she is swapping the staid red umbrella, the recognized brand logo at Citigroup, for the rather more whacky symbol of William Shatner at priceline.com
For the uninitiated, priceline.com sells discounted airline tickets, hotel rooms, car hire and even groceries on-line, and plans to add long-distance phone calls and petrol. Shatner, best known for his role as Captain Kirk in Star Trek plays the lead role in priceline's TV ad campaign.
So why did Miller leave? Not because of lack of opportunity, apparently. "I would have expected an opportunity to run a large business at Citi," she says. "It was just a matter of time." Perhaps Shatner's soulful rendition in one of priceline's recent ads of that famous song by The Animals - "We gotta get out of this place, if it's the last thing we ever do" - struck a chord with a senior executive at a large firm still in the throes of integration. Days later Citigroup co-CEO John Reed also tired of the tension and announced his retirement.
Or maybe it's because priceline.com simply has more chance of succeeding in one particular area: cross-selling. Last time Euromoney met Miller she was keen to talk up Citigroup's success in cross-selling financial services. But a recent report by Ernst and Young's states that insurance and banking conglomerates such as Citigroup don't appreciate just how much the internet undermines their attempts to cross-sell consumer products.
By contrast priceline.com has just the right mix: flights, hotels, car hire, and soon petrol. Customers associate these with each other much more than they do bank accounts and life insurance.
As for Cirillo, her role as head of Deutsche's global investment services - custody and cash management, basically - was never that secure, some say. At one extreme, she was apparently unhappy with Deutsche Bank's inability to deal with having a woman in charge - though she came from the Bankers Trust side and was courted by the Germans who paid her a whacking big salary and retention bonus.
There's yet another rumour: Bankers Trust had been involved in a long-running court case from the 1980s, along with several other institutions, concerning misappropriation of funds from a will. Last March, to help speed up the acquisition, BT pleaded guilty, and the impact on business shook Deutsche somewhat, to the extent that it began to wonder whether it might be best to sell the US GIS business. Deutsche now states that's not the case, that it's an important business for the group.







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