My column on Citigroup and Bank of America drew an insightful voice mail from Charles “Chip” Roame, managing principal of Tiburon Strategic Advisors in Tiburon, Calif. The financial-services consultant’s comments came too late to get into the column, but they’re too good to ignore. Says Roame:

Your headline is something like, “Financial superamerkets are dead, again.” This is kind of the third or fourth time that financial services companies have tried to create supermarkets and literally every time they have blown up. ….  It doesn’t work for a variety of reasons, one of which is simply management bandwidth. You think about a guy who is the CEO of Citigroup trying to manage a business that includes investment banking but also includes retail financial services and also includes insurance and also includes the country of Singapore. …  One of the reasons that financial supermarkets fail all the time is it’s just too broad a bandwidth for any management team to take care of.