A few facts about correspondent banking at Wells Fargo

Northwestern Financial Review, Jan 1, 2001

Sure as the Supreme Court meets the first Monday in October, bankers will gather the first Thursday in December for the annual "Duck Dinner." Norwest Corp. began hosting an annual event for correspondent bank customers 36 years ago. Those first meetings were informal gatherings at the Minikahda Club in Minneapolis where dinner actually included roast duck.

The event was reformatted as an allday executive management conference in the early 1 990s. Regularly attracting some 400 people, it has grown into one of the largest banking events in the Upper Midwest. When Wells Fargo and Norwest merged in 1998, managers in the correspondent department decided to keep the conference going.

The 2000 conference, conducted on Dec. 7 at the Minneapolis Marriott City Center Hotel, carried the theme "Focused on the Future." Among the presenters was.l. Thomas Wiklund, executive vice president for correspondent banking at Wells Fargo & Co. He described the breadth of his company's correspondent services. The bank's correspondent department consists of 90 people working in 17 locations in 12 states. Collectively they call on customers in 30 states.

Norwest had more than 70 years in the correspondent business, he said. Wells Fargo had 45 years in the business, prior to the merger. That experience came from the First Interstate franchise, which Wells Fargo acquired in the 1990s. In addition, Wells Fargo acquired First Commerce Bank of Lincoln, Neb., in June 2000,an organization that had been offering correspondent banking services for 90 years.

Wells Fargo has 3,000 correspondent customers, Wiklund said. "The vast majority of those are community banks," he said. The bank offers 58 correspondent products with about half Wells Fargo's customers using six products or more. He said the company-wide goal is to have each customer utilizing nine products.

Wiklund said the bank is in the processof developing a Web site for correspondent customers.