Leadership Changes at Ahmanson : Thrifts: Charles Rinehart will replace 26-year CEO Richard Deihl at Home Savings and its parent company.
In a major changing of the guard, H.F. Ahmanson & Co., the parent company of Home Savings of America, announced Tuesday that Charles R. Rinehart will replace Richard H. Deihl as chief executive of the nation’s largest savings and loan.
Rinehart will become chief executive of both Ahmanson and Home Savings, and will also serve as chairman of Home Savings. Deihl will remain as chairman of Ahmanson. The changes become effective Monday.
The change was expected. Deihl turned 65 last month and Rinehart was his obvious heir apparent, even though the 46-year-old ex-Army paratrooper had no previous experience as a savings and loan executive before coming to Home Savings four years ago.
Rinehart was hired as Ahmanson’s president and chief operating officer after stints as a top executive at Avco Financial Services in Irvine and Fireman’s Fund Insurance Co. in San Francisco.
Deihl has been chief executive of Home Savings for 26 years. He stuck mostly to the bread-and-butter business of making home mortgages and largely avoided the risky commercial real estate loans that sank so many other thrifts in the 1980s.
Though Home Savings has had problems recently, Deihl is widely regarded as one of the best managers in the business, along with Herb and Marion Sandler, the husband-and-wife team that runs Golden West Financial, parent company of World Savings in Oakland.
Along with the Sandlers, “Dick was one of the premier managers of the thrift industry,” said Kenneth D. Malamed, managing director of Wertheim Schroder Investment Services in Beverly Hills. “Those two institutions were the ones that came through the S&L; debacle relatively unscathed.”
During Deihl’s tenure, Home Savings grew from $2.6 billion and 36 branches in 1967 to today’s $50 billion in assets and 367 branches. The thrift has branches and loan offices in 13 states.
Deihl is credited with helping introduce the variable-rate mortgage in the early 1970s, an innovation that helped S&Ls; match loan interest revenue to that era’s highly volatile loan costs.
Mario J. Antoci, a former executive at Home Savings under Deihl who left in 1988 to become chief executive of American Savings Bank in Irvine, said Deihl’s policy of making no fixed-rate mortgage loans from 1974 to 1988 “probably saved the association.”
Rinehart promised no dramatic changes at Home Savings, which has been battered in recent months but has emerged apparently stronger. The thrift raised nearly $300 million with a preferred stock sale this summer and dramatically reduced its problem loans by selling $1.2 billion in problem assets in a bulk sale underwritten by Wall Street.
The streamlining at Home Savings will continue. Although Rinehart declined to comment, Ahmanson sources confirmed that the thrift plans to sell its credit card operation, a sale that would affect 50 to 60 employees. A Home Savings competitor, Great Western Bank, recently sold its credit card operation because the business wasn’t large enough to be profitable.
Rinehart said Home Savings will also continue to look at possible acquisitions. Ahmanson is one of many potential bidders for Homefed Bank, the failed San Diego thrift that will be sold by regulators later this year.
Bio: Charles R. Rinehart Charles R. Rinehart on Monday will replace Richard H. Deihl as chief executive of Irwindale-based H. F. Ahmanson & Co. and its principal unit, Home Savings of America, the nation’s largest thrift.
Age: 46
Birthplace: South San Francisco
Education: B.S. in mathematics, University of San Francisco, 1968
Family: Rinehart and wife Cynthia have four children.
Resume: Joined Ahmanson in 1989 as president and chief operating officer. Was president of Avco Financial Services in Irvine from 1983 to 1989. Was executive vice president of Fireman’s Fund Insurance Co. in San Francisco from 1969 to 1983. Was an Army paratrooper from 1968 to 1969.
Business philosophy: Key to business success boils down to “execution of the basic skills” centering on customer service and “running a cost-effective operation.”
Quote: “We’ve been planning this transition for 12 months, so nothing brand-new is going to happen on Nov. 1. We’ll just continue what we’re doing with more streamlining, to make our employees more marketing-oriented, to be better sellers and underwriters.”
