Wells Fargo Re-Envisions Online Banking for Corporations as It Moves to Become the Bank of the Future Today

Business Wire,  May 19, 2004  

Tags: bank, online banking, Wells Fargo & Co.

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Selected 150-Year Timeline:


1852   The first telegraph line connects Santa Clara County at the
       Wells Fargo office. When particularly important news came
       across the wire, the staff ran a flag up the flagpole and
       crowds gathered.

1855   Three years after its founding, Wells Fargo expands its first
       banking and express offices into Santa Clara County at San
       Jose and Santa Clara.

1940   Wells Fargo provides seed money to two young Valley engineers,
       Bill Hewlett and David Packard, who had produced a successful
       audio oscillator product.

1958   Wells Fargo opens a retail banking office in Santa Clara; one
       of Wells Fargo's first expansions from its San Francisco base
       into community branch banking.

1960s  Wells Fargo increasingly relies on computerization to help
       modernize its operations.

1970s  Specialized industry-oriented groups such as energy and high
       technology established at Wells with particular focus on the
       electronics industry. Offices in Palo Alto and San Jose
       opened.
       Genentech founder Robert Swanson leases space from Wells
       Fargo's venture capital department in San Francisco. Wells
       Fargo leases office equipment and staff support to the
       fledgling biotech company.

1980s  Wells Fargo takes its banking convenience to Silicon Valley's
       workforce by installing Expresservice(TM), a unique package of
       consumer financial services including direct payroll deposit
       and automated teller machines installed on-site at
       manufacturing plants such as Intel, for routine transactions.
       Wells Fargo provides financing to Silicon Valley technology and
       biotechnology companies such as Intel Corp, Apple Computer,
       Hewlett Packard, National Semiconductor, Genentech, Varian
       Assoc. and American Microsystems.

1990   Wells Fargo supports an art and publishing project "Portraits
       of Success" highlighting pioneers of Silicon Valley.

1993   Norwest Venture Partners, a subsidiary of Wells Fargo, opens
       office in Palo Alto and invests in Pleasanton-based
       Documentum.

1994   Norwest Venture Partners invests in Santa Clara-based Vantive
       and Calabasas-based Xylan (later acquired by Alcatel).

1995   Wells Fargo publishes "Silicon Valley: Changes and Challenges
       of a Post-Industrial Economy," a socio-economic profile of
       Silicon Valley.  Norwest Venture Partners invests in
       Pleasanton-based Polycom.

1996   Norwest Venture Partners invests in Santa Clara-based Extreme
       Networks.

1997   Norwest Venture Partners invests in San Jose-based Brocade
       Corporation.

1998   Norwest Venture Partners invests in Petaluma-based Cerent
       (later acquired by Cisco).

1999   Wells Fargo commits $5 million to Silicon Valley Community
       Ventures Investment Partners, LLC, a fund focused on providing
       equity financing to entrepreneurial for-profit companies in
       low-income communities in the Bay Area.
       Norwest Venture Partners invests in Oakland-based Forte
       Software (later acquired by Sun Microsystems).

2000   Wells Fargo sponsors the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose.
       Three-quarters of the Bank's $200,000 sponsorship goes to fund
       Pathways, a paid internship program for teens.

2001   Wells Fargo unveils its first phase Commercial Electronic
       Office(R) (CEO(R)) portal, which offers a suite of Internet-
       enabled products to commercial banking customers. The CEO(R)
       portal is immediately hailed as an industry-changing
       innovation.

2002   Wells Fargo inks a deal with PayPal of Mountain View to become
       the provider of secure internet payment processing services
       for the popular P2P transaction service.

2003   By 2003, the commercial Internet site had won accolades for
       ease of use and integration with off-line banking and was
       already handling $5.9 trillion in payments flowing through the
       CEO(R) portal.

2004   Wells Fargo sponsors "Projections: Silicon Valley 2005," a
       forum bringing together hundreds of non-profit, governmental,
       corporate, and community members to address key issues facing
       Silicon Valley.
       Working in conjunction with Bay Area technology innovators such
       as San Francisco-based TeaLeaf and San Jose-based BEA, Wells
       Fargo prepares for the roll out of the next generation CEO(R)
       portal in 2004.

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