When Sandy Weill’s Travelers merged with John Reed’s Citicorp in 1998 to create Citigroup, it seemed that the era of the financial supermarket – an effort to be all things to all people – was at hand.

Citigroup was a big universal bank like no other, capable of selling insurance, underwriting securities, advising on mergers and acquisitions, managing investments and providing consumer financial products to people who qualified for bank credit and those who did not, subprime borrowers who have come to notoriety for their role in the credit crisis.