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The 2016 Tech 50: Scott Dillon
The newly minted Wells Fargo CTO joins the Tech 50 ranking at No. 30
30Scott DillonChief Technology Officer, Head of Enterprise Information TechnologyWells Fargo & Co.PNRWhen Kevin Rhein (No. 19 last year) retired in March as chief information officer and head of the technology and operations group (TOG) at Wells Fargo & Co., his responsibilities were split three ways. Scott Dillon was named chief technology officer and head of enterprise information technology for the $1.8 trillion-in-assets banking company, which is the third-biggest in the U.S. and tops in the world in market capitalization. (Rhein’s other duties were parceled out to A. Charles Thomas, chief data officer, and Gerald Enos Jr., head of TOG operations.) In announcing the changes last December, Wells Fargo said Dillon would report to CFO John Shrewsberry, as does the San Francisco–based bank’s strategy group, underscoring IT’s importance and involvement in strategic initiatives. The bank, whose brand name is associated with territorial expansion, was among the first to bring financial services to the online and mobile frontiers, and it was an early supporter of the Linux Foundation’s blockchain standardization initiative, now called the Hyperledger Project. Wells Fargo has some 8,000 locations and 13,000 automated teller machines, and processes 800 million ATM transactions, 6.7 billion debit card purchases and 8 billion point-of-sale transactions annually. In June the bank teamed up with Xero, a New Zealand–based developer of accounting software in the cloud, on a secure data-sharing platform for business customers to access — and control access to — their bank information. “I really want to run things at scale,” says Dillon, 50, who has been with Wells for 22 years and oversees 17,000 people in the enterprise IT group. “Customers expect immediacy and transparency of service. We’re a business based around trust, and we want to make sure customers receive value from their institution.” Based in Minneapolis, Dillon is a Minnesota native who went to work for Wells predecessor Norwest Bank after graduating from the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management with a BS in banking. In 1996 he left for Deloitte Consulting, returning in 2002, four years after Norwest and Wells Fargo merged, to work in senior IT positions, including global head of technology infrastructure services. “That’s when I really started to run things,” he says. “I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”
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