Walter Wriston, 85; Innovative Banker Revolutionized Marketing, Technology

Walter B. Wriston, an iconoclastic banker who used technology and global expansion to help build what is now called Citigroup into one of the world’s largest banking companies, has died, Citigroup announced Thursday. He was 85.

Wriston died Wednesday in New York City of pancreatic cancer, the bank said.

Wriston spent nearly his entire career at the New York-based company and ran the bank as chief executive from 1967 until he retired in 1984. The bank, Citibank, was part of a holding company then called Citicorp, which later became Citigroup.

During his tenure, he more than doubled the bank’s size by expanding overseas and pushing for the end of interest-rate caps on deposits and other banking regulations, and by ushering in such technologies as the automated teller machine.

Wriston also shook the industry by shaping his bank into a financial supermarket that offered consumers and businesses an array of services beyond just accepting deposits and issuing loans.

Most other financial institutions later followed suit.

“Clearly, Walt stood out among his many peers as an innovator, having pioneered the automated teller machine, which changed the way people banked forever,” Citigroup Chief Executive Charles Prince said.

Wriston was “one of the foremost bankers of the 20th century,” said Prince, whose bank now oversees total assets of more than $1.4 trillion.

The son of two teachers, Wriston was known as being smart, aggressive, outspoken and at times acerbic. He held little reverence for banking traditions, which he considered largely outdated, and pursued the goal of raising Citicorp’s annual profit by at least 15% a year, which he usually accomplished.

He looked everywhere for growth. By the late-1970s, Citibank was operating in nearly 100 countries.

In the United States, he not only expanded the bank’s services, he hired non-bank marketing experts who “understood that bank accounts could be thought of as ‘product lines’ and peddled like breakfast cereal,” Joseph Nocera wrote in his 1994 book “A Piece of the Action.”

Wriston’s moves were not without controversy. His zeal for growth included making billions of dollars in loans to Latin America and other Third World regions, which saddled Citibank with huge losses in the 1980s when the loans couldn’t be repaid on time.

The debt crisis shattered the notion once voiced by Wriston that “countries do not go bankrupt.”

Walter Bigelow Wriston was born Aug. 3, 1919, in Middletown, Conn. He earned a bachelor of arts degree from Wesleyan University, where his father taught history, and later received a master of arts degree at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of International Law and Diplomacy.

After a year’s service with the State Department and a four-year tour with the U.S. Army during World War II, Wriston joined Citibank in 1946 as a junior inspector in the comptroller’s division. At the time, it was called First National City Bank.

For the next two decades, Wriston worked his way up through the company, becoming president and chief executive in 1967 and chairman of the board in 1970.

Wriston is survived by his second wife, Kathryn, whom he married after his first wife, Barbara, died in 1966; his daughter Catherine from his first marriage, and two grandchildren.