The late Walter Wriston was a man known for not mincing his words. "The person who figures out how to harness the collective genius of his or her organization is going to blow the competition away," he once said.
Wriston knew a thing or two about blowing markets away. As chairman and CEO of Citibank, he is billed as one of the most innovative financiers of our time. Wriston saw that the information revolution was not about technology; rather, he saw information as a valuable and powerful form of global capital. He wasted little time exploiting that notion in the industry and gave rise to a new breed of bankers.
Banking has a long history of turning out big ideas. Like Wriston, Till Guldimann, vice chair of SunGard and former head of global research at J.P. Morgan, sees opportunity in unconventional thinking. Guldimann is often referred to as the father of RiskMetrics, a set of standards for measuring market risk. His instinct about its value to clients, though, is what made history. He argued successfully to make a version of the bank's proprietary risk methodology available to clients. His entrepreneurial spirit would set the stage for the industry's pursuit of enterprisewide risk management.
Also sharing in Wriston and Guldimann's pioneering ways is Peter Kight, chairman and CEO of CheckFree Corp., a business he started in his grandmother's basement. If it were not for Kight's vision-helped along by Bank One's then-president John McCoy, who "loaned" Kight ACH time at the bank at night to get CheckFree off the ground-the payments revolution would not be where it is today.
By 2010, Forrester projects 52 percent of U.S. online households will be paying bills over the Internet-with Gen Xers and Gen Yers comprising 67 percent of electronic bill presentment and payment users.
This year, CheckFree celebrates its 25th anniversary, and shareholders have yet to be disappointed. CheckFree, with a $4 billion market cap, had revenues of $215.9 million, net income of $33.8 million and underlying net income of $41 million for the second quarter.
Innovation was never in short supply with Citibank's Wriston, J.P. Morgan's Guldimann and CheckFree's Kight. What's more, their contributions helped build empires-and cinched their legacies in financial services. Other innovators: John Reed, Robert Rubin, Sandy Weill, Alan Greenspan and Hugh McColl, to name a few.
In May, USB will celebrate a milestone of its own: 115 years of publishing history. In this issue, the magazine will pay tribute to those individuals whose out-of-the-box thinking and financial innovation have made the financial services industry what it is today.
