Gary Crittenden, who was recently named chief financial officer of Citi, will receive a base salary of about $500,000 in his first year on the job. According to a regulatory filing, however, he is eligible for incentive awards of as much as $9.5 million this year and next.
Citi has also agreed to make Crittenden whole if certain compensation from his former employer, American Express, is forfeited; the amount of any such payment has not been determined.
Last year Crittenden earned more than $6 million in salary, bonus, restricted stock, and long-term incentive payouts as Amex’s CFO and head of global network services. According to Amex’s most recent proxy, filed in March 2006, Crittenden had more than $9.8 million in exercisable options and more than $4.3 million in unexercisable options.
Citi’s disclosure of Crittenden’s compensation arrangement comes just as a number of other financial-services companies are filing their proxies, which reveal the 2006 pay packages for top executives. The proxies shine a spotlight on the wide disparity in pay and benefits received by CFOs at various types of financial institutions.
Crittenden’s deal, as it turns out, falls somewhere in the middle.
At the top end are the finance executives — for that matter, all the executives — who work for the major investment banks. For example, Goldman, Sachs recently disclosed that last year CFO David Viniar earned nearly $33 million, including a $20 million bonus and more than $11 million in restricted stock. Lehman Brothers CFO Christopher M. O’Meara earned $6 million, including a $2.3 million bonus and nearly $3.6 million in restricted stock.
At mutual-fund distributor T. Rowe Price, however, finance chief Kenneth V. Moreland earned only about $1.3 million. This included a $500,000 bonus in lieu of participation in the company’s annual incentive compensation pool, under which payouts were made to the other named executive officers. At SunTrust Banks, CFO Mark A. Chancy earned nearly $1.6 million.