Deanna W. Oppenheimer has spent years pushing Washington Mutual Inc. and its brand of quirky, low-fee consumer banking into the limelight.
Now she is taking center stage herself.
In a top-level reshuffling announced last week, Wamu added consumer mortgage and insurance to Ms. Oppenheimer's responsibilities, which already included running the Seattle company's 1,603-branch retail bank as the president of its banking and financial services group.
The reorganization squeezed out Craig S. Davis, who was the president of the home loan services group, which contributed about three-quarters of Wamu's $1 billion of net income in the second quarter. His departure followed other changes in the mortgage group.
Mr. Davis, 52, left on Tuesday - the day the reorganization was announced - in what the company called a voluntary retirement. A spokesman said Thursday that Dyan Beito, who was the head of consumer deposit services, would take over its mortgage processing operation, which has grown quickly but stumbled at times in recent years.
Eric Spence, the former head of home loan production, resigned on Sept. 22, the spokesman said.
Through 11 acquisitions since 1997 and a branch-building campaign, Wamu has become the nation's No. 1 servicer and one of the top three originators of home loans. However, it has been hit by consumer complaints and processing glitches, especially after it acquired three large servicing portfolios in as many years. Early last month it said errors in its tracking of loan commitments, combined with a spike in rates over the summer, would result in a third-quarter loss from the sale of mortgage loans.
Last week it confirmed that Texas officials had requested information about consumer complaints.
The consumer bank, meanwhile, has gained prominence as Wamu refines its strategy of becoming, as Kerry K. Killinger, its chairman and chief executive, put it last month, "America's No. 1 retailer of consumer financial services," in part through cross-selling efforts at its bank branches and mortgage offices. [
Second-quarter profits from the banking and financial services group rose 38%, to $327 million. This year it has increased its checking account base, a much-watched indicator of future bank profits, by 820,000.
R. Jay Tejera, an analyst at Wells Fargo & Co.'s Ragen Mackenzie & Co. in Seattle, said that last week's reorganization - and Ms. Oppenheimer's ascent - would send the message that "consumer banking will grow faster than mortgage banking and be an object of a lot of investment" at Wamu.
By contrast, "mortgage banking is as big a piece of Wamu as it's ever going to be," he said.
Ms. Oppenheimer, 45, has spent most of her career at Wamu but is now likely to raise her profile beyond its tight-knit community.
Wamu plans to blanket the fastest-growing metropolitan markets with consumer bank branches. It will open 250 this year and about 200 a year after that for the foreseeable future. It also says it expects to enter at least one metropolitan market a year. It wants to expand its credit card offerings and online bill payment services and to boost cross-selling by increasing the number of broker-licensed bankers in its branches.
The reorganization also can be seen as setting up the field for the eventual successor to Mr. Killinger, 54, by leaving similarly aged executives in charge of the two major business groups.
Ms. Oppenheimer's counterpart is Craig Chapman, the 48-year-old president of the $34 billion-asset specialty finance group. Last week he was also put in charge of subprime mortgages and community and external affairs. Both groups were formerly under Mr. Davis.
Commercial banking, which was one of Ms. Oppenheimer's divisions, has also become Mr. Chapman's.
A former magazine advertising saleswoman, Ms. Oppenheimer is a native of Caldwell, Idaho, and holds a degree in urban affairs from the University of Puget Sound.
When she joined in 1985 Wamu as a marketing and government relations officer, she figured that she would leave after a few years to run her own business. But over the next decade she rose swiftly through the corporate relations and consumer banking divisions as one of a few confident young bankers mentored by then-CEO Louis Pepper.
After stints running the market research and retail and wholesale mortgage operations, she became the president of the consumer bank in 1999.
She is credited for pushing Wamu to position itself as a middle-market consumer bank - a vision that Mr. Killinger shares. Her efforts include rolling out the trademark free checking product in 1994 and initiating research that led to the development of Starbucks-style Occasio branches. Wamu uses the no-fee account and the unconventional branches as selling points when its enters a market. Another has been the free access it gives noncustomers to its automated teller machines nationwide.
Through a spokesman, Ms. Oppenheimer declined to comment for this article. But Mr. Tejera called her "very market-research driven [and] thoroughly prepared for decisions to be made."
Ms. Oppenheimer is not a mortgage expert, Mr. Tejera said. But Wamu has given her reinforcements - three senior mortgage executives were moved to the newly organized retail group.
Not everything has gone smoothly under the free-checking, no-fee model. Wamu recently had to take steps to reduce deposit losses after discovering that too many of its customers were depositing bad checks.
Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve Board is reviewing how companies assess checking overdraft fees, which generate a significant portion of Wamu's consumer banking fee income.
And Visa's interchange fees, which offset part of the fees it gives up when it does not charge noncustomers for using its ATMs, are declining as a result of the Wal-Mart settlement announced this year. That settlement is expected to cut $20 million from Wamu's earnings this year.
In the community, Ms. Oppenheimer is known for her sense of humor (her "big laugh" usually perks up the room, says one acquaintance) and her willingness to delegate.
"She's got quite an informal style," said Thomas Leavitt, the president of the Seattle real estate investment firm Leavitt Capital Cos., and a member of the University of Puget Sound's board of trustees. Ms. Oppenheimer, who has stayed involved with the university since graduation, was elected the board's chairman in May and makes weekly phone calls to the school's president.
"I think she has very definite ideas on how to manage and maintain growth," Mr. Leavitt said.
She also is willing to take risks. From August 2001 to August 2002 she forewent her $877,000 salary and bonus and worked only part-time at Wamu. During that time she spent more time with her two children and completed a four-week executive management program at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management.
Her husband, John Oppenheimer, has financial ties to Wamu. From December 2000 to December 2002 it paid his property management company, Columbia Hospitality Inc., more than $600,000 to develop its Cedarbrook conference center, Wamu said in its annual report.
Last year it paid Columbia Resource Group, another company owned by Mr. Oppenheimer, $406,048 to manage conferences. In February 2002 it also agreed to pay Columbia Hospitality $21,000 a month to manage Cedarbrook through 2007.
