Leader of Wells Fargo in the 1980s and ’90s
The New York Times
Carl E. Reichardt, who as chairman and chief executive of Wells Fargo during the 1980s and ’90s introduced a leaner approach to commercial banking that served as a model for the industry, died on July 13 at his home in Belvedere, Calif., in the San Francisco Bay Area. He was 86.
His daughter, Gretchen Reichardt Pullara, said the cause was cardiopulmonary distress.
Stocky, barrel-chested and blunt — “I guess you could call me fun-loving but hard-nosed,” he once told an in-house newsletter — Mr. Reichardt was not wellknown in the banking community when he was chosen as president of the San Francisco-based Wells Fargo in 1978. But he quickly became a major figure, especially after being named chief executive in 1982.
Turning away from Wells Fargo’s aggressive pursuit of global operations and being all things to all customers, Mr. Reichardt shed much of the bank’s international and financial services businesses, slashed costs and refocused on retail banking and a few other activities in its home state of California.
His aim, as he put it, was to make the bank operate like a fast-food restaurant, with a limited menu but consistent service and low prices.
His zealous focus on the bottom line — “We do have almost a fetish about this expense control thing,” he told The New York Times in 1989 — earned him a reputation for cold calculation. He pursued automation, investing heavily in ATMs and computer systems to handle financial processing; and shut down operations that did not meet his profit goals, leading to thousands of layoffs.
Those measures paid off for Wells Fargo: The bank holding company’s stock price nearly tripled in the first three years of his tenure as chief executive. He oversaw a 1,781 percent total return to investors before retiring in 1994, far above the increase of 385 percent for the Standard & Poor’s 500- stock index during the same period.
Mr. Reichardt held jobs from childhood, including at a lumber company that built houses. He enrolled at the University of Houston but left to enlist in the Navy in 1950, joining the Korean War effort.
Stationed in Long Beach, Calif., he met a fellow quartermaster, Patricia Longenecker, whom he married in 1954 and who survives him. Besides his daughter, he is also survived by his sons Carl Jr. and Fritz, and six grandchildren.