Citigroup Inc. will sell its red umbrella trademark to St. Paul Travelers Cos., severing ties to the symbol Sanford Weill chose to represent the financial-services empire that he built into the largest American bank.

Citigroup will operate under the “Citi” name and use the sale’s proceeds to pay for rebranding, the New York-based company said in a statement yesterday. St. Paul Travelers plans to change its name to The Travelers Cos. after the transaction is completed in March. Terms weren’t announced.

The deal reunites the Travelers name with a consumer icon that dates from at least 1870, and ends attempts by Citigroup to make the umbrella symbolize its own array of financial products. The bank acquired the logo in 1998 when Mr. Weill helped lead the merger of Citicorp and Travelers Group, only to find consumers still thought of insurance whenever they saw the red umbrella.

“It really is quite remarkable how many times people would come back and either say it’s Travelers or the Travelers Insurance umbrella,” the chairman and chief executive officer of St. Paul Travelers, Jay Fishman, said in a conference call.

Citigroup spun off Travelers Property Casualty Corp. in 2002 while keeping the logo. In 2004, Travelers Property Casualty merged with St. Paul Cos. in a $17.9 billion deal engineered by Mr. Fishman. He held the top post at Travelers while it was part of Citigroup, leaving in October 2001 to run St. Paul.

Charles Prince, the current CEO of Citigroup, announced plans to cut more than $1 billion in costs this year after shareholders complained expenses were growing too fast and profits too slowly. The company didn’t say today how much the re-branding will cost.

“As an investor, I would rather see results on the bottom line than see them doing things more on a cosmetic level,” an analyst with Milwaukee-based FAF Advisors, which oversees more than $100 billion and owns Citigroup shares, Amit Kumar, said. “The brand is pretty strong; all they’re doing is tweaking it a bit.”

Mr. Weill fought to keep the umbrella when he spun off Travelers from the bank, spending millions on advertising, stationery, and signs, according to Monica Langley’s book “Tearing Down the Walls.”

“I would say good riddance,” the president of Old Greenwich, Connecticut-based Trout and Partners Ltd., a marketing strategy firm, Jack Trout, said. “It belongs with the insurance company; it certainly doesn’t belong with Citi.”