Richard M. Kovacevich

So the, so the investment banking, investment bankers and regulators would make the call.

Uh, it would come into our CEO at the time, uh, Dick Kovacevich, our CFO at the time, Howard Atkins, or the head of corporate strategy, uh, Bruce Helsel.

So you guys sat down, you went to the office in LA, constructed a war room, were working all weekend.

Then what?

Of course.

It was this guy called Richard Kovacevich, and he was at a company called Norwest, which was a big US bank in the 1980s.

By 1993, he had become CEO, and the reason he'd become CEO so quickly was he came up with the idea that the only way a bank in the US can expand is to move beyond banking.

Like, basically, the whole idea was there's too much competition in the retail market.