A Huge Role

Banks nowadays have many capabilities. It can make international transactions and billions of profits are made all done electronically. Many people still associate banks with the brick and mortar branches that they’ve had for ages.  In fact many people will associate the strength of the bank with the number of bank branches they see.  Branch banking may be the old way of doing banking but it is still a big chunk of the business and will continue to do so.
 
Any person who is in charge of handling the branches of a huge bank belongs to the elite crops of managers. This person is literally in charge of the face of the bank. The branches are the front liners of the bank. For banking giant Wells Fargo, it has Carrie L. Tolstedt heading its Community Banking division.  She is thus responsible for retail, small business and business banking.

On its own the division she heads would be a huge company. It serves 22 million retail banking households with its more than 104,000 employees. It also caters to 2.5 million small business and business banking households. This unit has more than 6,200 retail banking stores and more than 12,000 ATM in 39 states and the District of Columbia to serve its customers.

Carrie can be considered a bank insider. She started her career in 1986 joining Norwest Bank in Nebraska.  Carrie joined another company FirstMerit Corporation then opted to rejoin Norwest.  Norwest merged with Wells Fargo in 1998. The merger did not slow down Carrie’s rise in the new organization; she eventually became the Central California regional president of Wells Fargo in 2001. From there it has been steady rise to positions of more responsibilities.

Her ascent at Wells Fargo has not gone unnoticed. In 2010 U.S. Banker magazine listed her as among the “25 Most Powerful Women in Banking”, and she held the number one spot. Carrie earned her B.S. degree in Business Administration at the University of Nebraska and finished the Pacific Coast Banking School at University of Washington.