Carl Reichardt — set new course for Wells as chairman in ’80s
Carl Reichardt, who as chairman and chief executive of Wells Fargo during the 1980s and introduced a leaner approach to commercial banking that served as a model for the industry, died on July 13 at his home in Belvedere. 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 funloving but hard-nosed,” he once told an in-house newsletter — Mr. Reichardt was not well known in the banking community when he was named president of 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; cut the budget for items like an annual Christmas tree on the executive floor; 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.
He was born Carl Edwin Reichardt Jr. in Houston on July 6, 1931, the elder of two children born to Carl E. Reichardt, who managed the Auditorium Hotel in the city, and the former Cora Elizabeth Robichaux, an accountant for a lumber company. (The younger Reichardt dispensed with “Jr.” after his father died but later named his own son Carl Jr.)
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, 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.
Finding California’s climate more attractive than Houston’s, the Reichardts stayed after leaving the service. Mr. Reichardt resumed his education at the University of Southern California, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in economics. He got his start in banking in a training program at Citizens Bank in Los Angeles.
Citizens eventually became part of Wells Fargo under Mr. Reichardt, through an acquisition of Crocker National Corp., which had previously bought Citizens.
After six years at Citizens, Mr. Reichardt went to Union Bank in Los Angeles, where he spent much of his time making loans to real estate developers and commercial builders. That expertise was what Wells Fargo was seeking when it hired him in 1970 to create a real estate investment trust in Los Angeles and a bank unit to advise it.
He retired in 1994, but went on to serve on several corporate boards, including that of Ford Motor Co., where in 2001 William Clay Ford Jr., in his first act as chief executive, named Mr. Reichardt vice chairman, giving him broad responsibilities over the company’s leasing, credit and rental car operations.