The 2014 Tech 50: Kevin Rhein

July 08, 2014

< The 2014 Tech 50: Moving Out of the Lab and Into the Cloud

Kevin Rhein

Chief Information Officer

Wells Fargo & Co.

(PNR)

Wells Fargo & Co. operates in 35 countries and has 70 million customers, including 24 million online and 13 million on mobile devices. Yet senior executive vice president and chief information officer Kevin Rhein manages his dispersed operations and technology team of 24,000 not out of San Francisco, where the $1.5 trillion-in-assets banking company is headquartered, but from Minneapolis, where Rhein, 60, has been based since he joined Norwest Corp. in 1993. Norwest bought Wells in 1998, adopting its storied brand name and tradition of innovation. (Wells was one of the first to offer Internet banking services, circa 1995.) In 2008 the new Wells went coast-to-coast by acquiring North Carolina–based Wachovia Corp., and that reinforced Rhein’s view that Minneapolis, an active airline hub, is “a better place to be.” A University of Chicago MBA and 15-year Citicorp veteran who came to Norwest when it acquired Citibank Arizona, Rhein headed Wells’s card services and consumer lending group before taking over technology in 2011, at the tail end of the deliberately paced and virtually flawless Wachovia integration. Such processes never really end. “The next wave of integration is to further simplify and get more efficient,” he says. Data management advances are “the key to the next stage of providing real-time solutions to our customers’ financial needs.”

The 2014 Tech 50