Citicorp's chairman, John Reed, is now 59. Though he looks likely to remain in place while the merger with Travelers Group is work in progress it won't be too long before his succession is again debated. When it is, one name certain to figure prominently is Victor Menezes, who with Michael Carpenter now has the job of knitting together the corporate banking businesses of Citicorp and Travelers' Salomon Smith Barney.
Born in Pune, India, in 1949 into a Catholic family from Goa, Menezes spent many of his early years on the move as the family followed the postings of his father, who later became chairman of Indian Railways. "I'll never have a job as big as his," says Menezes. "He had a million people working for him." At boarding school in Rajasthan, he was an enthusiastic - although "not stellar" - cricketer and football player. He later did an electrical engineering degree at the elite Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay, where he edited the student newspaper - he also wrote for national newspapers. "I would have loved to have been a journalist," he says.
Good sense prevailed, however, and in 1972 he started his MBA at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a nursery then for cutting-edge derivatives ideas and the legendary Salomon Brothers fixed-income arbitrage team.