Priceline.com Attracts Another Key Exec: Citigroup CFO Miller
Priceline.com Inc., an Internet site where consumers can bid on plane tickets, groceries and other goods, said Wednesday that it hired Heidi Miller, chief financial officer of Citigroup, the nation’s largest financial services company, as its new CFO.
In quitting Citigroup, Miller, 46, is a leaving a company with 174,000 employees and a $170 billion market value for a 2-year-old business with 177 workers and a value of $7.6 billion.
Fortune magazine last year called her the second most-powerful businesswoman in the U.S.
Miller joins the ranks of other top executives who have bolted to join young and fast-growing “dot-com” companies, including Andersen Consulting chief George Shaheen, who went to Webvan Group Inc.
“She’s leaving a real company with huge real earnings to roll the dice on a company whose business prospects are still uncertain,” said bank analyst Lawrence Cohn at Ryan, Beck & Co.
Miller will lead Priceline.com’s efforts to develop business in the U.S. and abroad as senior vice president of strategic planning and administration. She succeeds Paul Francis, 45, who will remain associated with two affiliates of Priceline.com.
Priceline shares closed up $1.75 at $51.88 on Nasdaq. The Stamford-based company’s stock has more than tripled from its initial offering in March.
New York-based Citigroup fell 38 cents to close at $50.63 on the New York Stock Exchange. The company was formed in the 1998 merger between Citicorp bank and insurer-broker Travelers Group Inc., and includes the Salomon Smith Barney securities firm.
As CFO of Citigroup, Miller installed systems that allowed her to monitor daily the profitability of each of the company’s businesses, which include mutual funds, insurance, banking, mortgages, credit cards and investment banking, analysts said.
“She knows what’s going on in every nook and cranny of that company,” said Richard Strauss, a Goldman, Sachs & Co. analyst who advises investors to buy Citigroup shares.
Miller doesn’t have a typical Wall Street resume.
The native New Yorker graduated in 1974 from Princeton University with a bachelor’s degree in Latin American history and went on to get a doctorate from Yale University. After that, Miller joined Chemical Bank in 1979, holding various positions until she joined the emerging markets division in 1987.
In February 1992, Sanford Weill, then head of Travelers Group Inc., talked Miller into joining his company as an assistant to the president. Three years later, she became CFO. Miller is the latest prominent name to join Priceline.com. Last month, the company hired Gap Inc. executive Michael McCadden as chief marketing officer. In August, Priceline.com named Nissan Motor Corp.’s Michael Seergy as general manager of the new auto unit.
And in July, Priceline.com named automotive analyst and author Maryann Keller as president of its new-car buying service.
“These Internet companies are attracting the kind of talent they never could if it weren’t for the stock prices,” said Ryan Beck’s Cohn.
