Vanity Fair-
Once upon a time, in 1970, long before America’s banking system was dominated by six giant institutions—JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley—Dennis Hambek started working as a messenger at the National Bank of Washington in Ellensburg, Washington. Over the years, as his career advanced from messenger to loan officer to branch manager, he had a front-row seat at the transformation of America’s banking system. That first year, the National Bank of Washington was swallowed up by Pacific National Bank of Seattle, which in 1981 was bought by Los Angeles-based First Interstate Bancorp, which in 1996 was bought by San Francisco-based Wells Fargo, which in 1999—as the consolidation frenzy was reaching its peak—merged with Norwest, a Minneapolis-based bank, in a $34 billion deal.
Wells Fargo, which was founded in 1852 as a stagecoach express to carry valuable goods to and from the gold mines in the West, had a storied brand, so the new, combined company kept that name. But if Norwest’s name didn’t survive, its corporate culture did. Spearheaded by the company’s then C.E.O., Dick Kovacevich, it involved a novel way of thinking about banking.
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