In his seminal essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent," T.S. Eliot wrote, "Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature, will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past."
Eliot was writing of the relationship of contemporary poets to the literary past. But his insight can be applied equally to other endeavors, like banking, and not only because Eliot donned a bowler hat every morning for eight years and made his way to the offices of the foreign and colonial department of Lloyds Bank, where he was employed as a clerk. Visionaries not only improvise a new future; they inevitably revise our understanding of the past.
So it was with Walter Wriston, the former Citicorp chairman and legendary financial innovator who died last month at 85. His simple but radical observation that money was, in essence, information sparked the transformation not only of an industry but also of consumer habits -- that is to say, the way we live our lives.
Today, with cash flowing freely from ATMs, with a superabundance of credit available to consumers the world over, and with the increasing accessibility of e-commerce, it is almost impossible to imagine the stuffy somnolence of the nine-to-three banking world that Wriston entered nearly six decades ago, after three years in the U.S. Army.
Wriston's touch was not always golden. In the late 1960s Citi -- then known as First National City Bank -- mailed out unsolicited credit cards en masse, only to discover that the recipients, while delighted to use the cards, couldn't always pay the balances (the bank wound up writing off millions). And its aggressive lending to the developing world helped precipitate the 1980s' debt crisis and nearly sank Citi. But Wriston's legacy is far more weighted to his achievements than his stumbles.
It is rare to find poetry in banking -- Eliot decamped for the publishers Faber and Gwyer (later Faber and Faber) in 1925. But from time to time, poets do emerge in the financial world to shape the future and reshape the past. Walter Wriston surely belongs in their company.
