"Your company had a very good year," the then-chairman of Marshall & Ilsley Corp., J.A. (Jack) Puelicher, wrote to shareholders of the venerable Wisconsin bank holding company a couple of decades ago. "Some of it was due to luck; some of it was due to good planning and management."
That Midwestern self-effacement, along with the good results and the luck, continue to characterize M&I, but it's a very different enterprise from the modest regional bank it was in Puelicher's day. For a start, the chief driver of M&I's revenue growth today is a high-tech data-processing subsidiary that caters to banks all over the country. M&I itself is no longer a "Wisconsin" bank; it operates 251 branches in seven states. What's more, the bank now collects more than half of its revenues in the form of fees rather than interest. And the banking environment itself has changed: Today it's downright inhospitable to many midsize regionals like M&I, which keep falling prey to national institutions or other bank consolidators.
Still, whether because of luck or good planning, something is brewing in Milwaukee. M&I, now the country's 24th-largest bank, with $40 billion in assets, saw its revenues rise 13.3 percent, to $2.6 billion, and its net income 15.3 percent, to $627 million, in 2004. Its return on equity was a solid 17.89 percent. M&I's share price reflected these results, ascending 16 percent for the year -- 5 percentage points better than the average for ten regional banks in a peer group followed by Keefe, Bruyette & Woods analyst David Konrad.
Over the past decade the bank has increased consolidated earnings by 10 to 12 percent a year, with ROE consistently in the 17 percent range. That compares with average growth of 9 percent and an average ROE of 15.5 percent for midcap regional banks. "It's a company that offers above-peer-average growth and below-peer-average risk," proclaims KBW's Konrad, who is based in New York. "That's a very compelling combination."
On the off-putting side, M&I's hot tech subsidiary, Metavante Corp., may soon have to struggle with a potential erosion of its core deposit-processing business. The bank, meanwhile, faces intense competition in almost every one of its product and geographic markets, and M&I's very success makes it a potential takeover prize. But chief executive Dennis Kuester sees no reason to change what has been a winning formula.
"We're a dull story and proud of it," insists Kuester (pronounced "kess-ter"), the 62-year-old native Milwaukeean and former IBM Corp. salesman who is M&I's president, CEO and chairman. He gained the last title in January, after having become president of the M&I holding company in 1987 and CEO in 2002 upon the retirement of James Wigdale, who was chairman through December and remains a director.
"If there's any kind of culture here, it's that there's no flash," says Kuester. "We're real meat-and-potatoes folks."
That description only partly captures the M&I ethos, however. Hanging prominently on the wall of Kuester's comfortable but modest office on the sixth floor of the company's glass-and-concrete headquarters in downtown Milwaukee is a copy of the Ten Commandments. Each morning the CEO reads the same Bible verse, Micah 6:8. The eighth century B.C. social protester and prophet of doom said, "What does the Lord require but to be just, to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God?"
Kuester belongs to the Protestant Reformed Church, part of a small denomination that espouses mostly conservative social values and has a strong tradition of missionary work. When Kuester and his wife, Sandy, are staying at their vacation homes in rustic-chic Door County, Wisconsin, or in Bonita Springs, Florida, they attend Baptist services. The M&I CEO is involved in several interfaith ministries in Milwaukee -- most of them devoted to addressing poverty or social injustice -- and is chairman of the local Christian Stewardship Foundation, which gives grants to faith-based nonprofits involved in drug and alcohol rehabilitation and other social causes.
Although Kuester views religion as a deeply personal and private matter, he reckons that the bank's quiet but resolute commitment to religious values resonates with customers and investors at a time of perceived widespread corporate wrongdoing.
"People say this is a bad time to be a corporate executive," Kuester notes. "I say it's a good time. You can differentiate yourself and your company on principles and ethics."
This isn't to suggest, however, that M&I operates as a "Christian" company. There are no religious requirements for employees -- for one thing, that would be illegal -- nor are Christian images displayed in any of M&I's branches.
"I'm not promoting my religion -- not at all," says Kuester, a 29-year veteran of the organization. "I'm just saying we subscribe to a set of ethics that happen to be based on the Christian-Judeo principles upon which this country is based."
Those principles set the tone for the way M&I conducts business. Mark Furlong, who joined the company as CFO in 2001 and is now president of its M&I Bank subsidiary, says that top managers "all have strong beliefs and are involved in their churches." But no single belief dominates, adds Furlong, a Roman Catholic, and religion isn't a topic of everyday office conversation.
"Dennis never comes out and says, 'These are our religious principles,'" says Furlong, 47. "But that's the fiber underneath our decisions. The philosophy is apparent to all."
M&I expects employees to volunteer in their communities, though there is no formal requirement that they do so. The bank, for its part, regards the well-being of its employees to be part of its mission. The slide show at the April 2004 annual meeting informed shareholders that all M&I employees "are inspired to excel and grow, both personally and professionally, in an atmosphere of trust, integrity and respect." ("Integrity" was underlined.)
The M&I ethic extends to customers. If someone has a problem with, say, a Metavante product, says Kuester, "we'll fix it," regardless of what the contract says. "It's not about what we can legally get away with," the CEO explains. "It's about what we think is the right thing to do." Judeo-Christian scruples aside, Kuester sees this as good business: "It makes for a more sustainable business model if customers know they can count on us if something goes wrong."
But Kuester contends that M&I managers' values do not make them any less hardheaded about business. The bank relies, he says, on the same metrics -- branch profit-and-loss statements, deposit growth and customer-satisfaction interviews -- that other financial institutions use, and it sternly judges employees who do not measure up.
"We're not sitting around here singing 'Kumbaya,'" the CEO declares, chuckling. "We're dedicated to growing shareholder value, and I can hire -- and fire -- with the best of them." Indeed, M&I keeps a tight rein on its payroll: It employs only about 1,000 more people than it did three years ago, despite having bought four banks and several sizable technology companies.
Kuester explains that regarding personnel matters, the difference between him and other CEOs is in their approach. "When you fire somebody, you are admitting that you put that person in the wrong spot."
WHETHER IT'S DIVINE PROVIDENCE OR NOT, Kuester, who earned his bachelor's degree in accounting and finance at the University of WisconsinMilwaukee, appears to be the right person to lead M&I to the promised land -- which looks less and less like Wisconsin. Over the past three years, M&I has reduced its Badger State branches to 196 from 213, while expanding its operations in Minneapolis, Phoenix and St. Louis -- all faster-growing markets than Wisconsin -- and in Florida, where its two branches (in Naples and Bonita Springs) primarily service snowbirds with private banking needs. It even has an office in Sin City itself, Las Vegas. Between Metavante and M&I's correspondent banking and commercial lending customers, the company covers every state.
But what sets M&I apart from other midsize banks, and even from the giants, is its technology subsidiary. Based in the Milwaukee suburb of Brown Deer, Metavante provides a host of services to 5,200 banks in the U.S. and 30 other countries -- everything from old-style check clearing and statement processing to electronic funds transfers and online bill payment. A client making full use of the sub's offerings has Metavante-supplied terminals for its tellers and loan officers and puts all of its transactions -- check, ATM, credit card and Internet -- through Metavante's data center.
The tech unit's financial institution customers have a combined $746 billion in assets -- more than all but three U.S. banking companies (Bank of America Corp., Citigroup and J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.). Clients of Metavante's core deposit-processing service -- mostly small and midsize banks -- typically pay a fee of about 50 cents per account per month, plus additional fees for other services.
Metavante's sundry activities generated $972 million in sales in 2004, a one-third increase over 2003's total. The subsidiary, which employs 5,000 of M&I's nearly 13,000 workers, now provides about a third of its parent company's total revenues and 13 percent of its earnings. That proportion of profits is as low as it is because outsourcing is a relatively high-overhead proposition; Metavante bears costs that other banks prefer not to and earns its money in part by enabling customers to share those costs. On the other hand, established processing operations like Metavante's require relatively little additional capital to grow, making their ROE higher than that of the typical bank.
Kuester's fondness for the data-processing business can be traced to his IBM days. IBM (nicknamed, not for nothing, "I've been moved") had wanted to bring its star Midwestern computer salesman to the New York City area. Instead, Kuester, who had two young children, quit and joined one of his best IBM clients -- Metavante's predecessor, M&I Data Services -- as a vice president in 1976. He was named the data unit's president in 1985 and became CEO in 1993, when the subsidiary served only 500 bank clients and had $136 million in revenues. In a little more than a decade, that customer base has multiplied tenfold and sales have soared sevenfold.
Kuester believes that Metavante separates M&I from the banking crowd. "We know we can't be as successful as we would like by just being a regional bank and executing," he says. "If you don't have something unique about your franchise that differentiates you operationally and in the eyes of investors, then you're at risk of being overwhelmed by the bigger guys."
Metavante undeniably gives M&I cachet with investors, who sometimes seem to regard the whole enterprise as a high-flying tech company with an old-fashioned bank attached to it. M&I's forward price-earnings ratio of about 13 is two to three points higher than those of typical regional banks as well as BofA, Citigroup and J.P. Morgan Chase. Characteristically, Kuester comments that "we're less concerned with P/E and more concerned with trying to grow the E."
The crux of Kuester's plan for long-term growth is to build on Metavante's impressive customer base by cross-selling more banking services. He puts a practical business-to-business gloss on this oft-proclaimed but rarely pulled-off objective. Although he certainly doesn't object to, say, selling small-business owners on the bank's wealth management capabilities, he is especially intent on deepening Metavante's relationships with other banks by getting them to buy M&I's correspondent banking services, including foreign exchange, letters of credit, payments and trust.
"The question is," says Kuester, "How many additional products and services can we sell into that market?"
Within M&I, Metavante is viewed less as a technology subsidiary than as a regular member of the bank's financial institutions group. The subsidiary's sales reps stick to marketing financial tech products such as electronic payments and check imaging, but they're counted upon to introduce M&I salespeople to bank executives with whom they have relationships. "Metavante is already selling to so many of these banks," explains Kuester. "So we say, 'Let's use those relationships to give us a warm lead and open the door.'" And because many costs associated with Metavante and with M&I's correspondent network are fixed, incremental business flows right to the bottom line.
A typical cross-selling client is Philadelphia's Bancorp Bank, a $532 million-in-assets institution that started using Metavante for data processing in 2000, the year the bank was founded by former executives of JeffBanks (which had been acquired by New Jersey's Hudson United Bancorp in 1999). Bancorp's managers brought some big corporate clients along with them. The bank, however, imposes a $7.5 million limit on loans to any one borrower, and the idea of inviting other local lenders to augment its credits through loan-participation deals wasn't palatable. "These are our best customers, and we didn't want someone trying to steal them," explains Arthur Birenbaum, Bancorp's executive vice president for commercial lending.
So Bancorp's Metavante rep brought in an M&I Bank sales team. At first, Bancorp was skeptical. "To bring in a large bank from outside our territory didn't make sense," says Birenbaum. But M&I persuaded Bancorp that it could provide the credit clout without trying to poach the bank's best clients. Today the Wisconsin bank has $60 million in Bancorp participations on its books and, what's more, provides the Philadelphia institution with such services as forex and letters of credit.
"They help lever our balance sheet with their balance sheet and allow us to offer our customers products we otherwise wouldn't be able to offer," says Birenbaum. Adds Kuester, "We can make a bank look bigger than its biggest competitor with our technology and with overlines that allow it to extend credit to companies that otherwise might outgrow the bank."
No other bank is trying to cross-sell to other financial institutions on the same scale as M&I, because no other bank has such a big technology company embedded within it. Yet Kuester himself concedes that Metavante's cross-selling strategy remains a work in progress and that he is uncertain how large it might get. "There are no benchmarks and no hard expectations," he explains. "No one has ever really done this before."
METAVANTE MIGHT NOT EVEN BE PART OF M&I were it not for the tech stock bust of 2000. Having started out in 1964 as M&I's data-processing department, the unit gradually took on the back-office operations of more and more banks and, under the M&I Data Services banner, blossomed in the 1990s. In July 2000 it adopted the Metavante name -- from "meta," meaning all-encompassing, and "avante," for forward movement -- in preparation for an IPO.
The rationale for going public was simple: Metavante's publicly traded outsourcing rivals, notably Monett, Missouribased Jack Henry & Associates and Brookfield, Wisconsin's Fiserv, were fetching P/Es above 40; M&I was trading in the midteens. Subsumed within the bank and lacking the bargaining chip of a soaring stock, Metavante had to struggle to compete both for deals and for options-obsessed programming talent.
The IPO, however, was filed in July 2000, four months after the tech bubble burst, and in early November, as market conditions worsened, M&I decided to postpone the issue indefinitely. "We were trying to push the offering out at $8 a share but realized that the way things were going, it could be $5 six months later," Kuester recalls.
Trying to make the most of a still-captive Metavante, Kuester in January 2003 hired Frank Martire, who had served ten years as president and COO of Fiserv's financial institutions systems services group, to be president of Metavante's own financial services group. Two months later Martire became president and CEO of the entire unit. Almost immediately, says KBW's Konrad, "you could see a little quicker step and more energy." Under the 57-year-old Martire, Metavante has landed deposit-processing contracts with Bank of Hawaii Corp., Mellon Financial Corp. and the mainland U.S. operations of Puerto Rico's Popular, parent of Banco Popular.
These are real coups. The banks are sizable, and switching processors is so cost-laden and fraught with logistical hazards that few institutions ever dare to do it. "Since processing technologies are often considered commodities, winning business from an entrenched competitor usually requires aggressive deal making and cutthroat pricing," says Andrew Dresner, a vice president and technology consultant for First Manhattan Consulting Group in New York. "But it can often be worth it, because having the processing relationship makes the sale of other products easier."
"It's a huge, huge deal," says Alberto Parachinni, the Chicago-based executive vice president of operations for Popular's $10 billion-in-assets mainland business, of his company's move to Metavante. "It's so complex, you risk losing customers if something goes wrong." The bank shifted about 15 applications, controlling such crucial functions as wire transfers and teller workstations, from Fiserv to Metavante in October 2003.
The conversion went off without a hitch, says Parachinni. He notes that "economics played a role" in Popular's decision, but he adds that he's pleased with Metavante's technology and its tie-in to M&I. "Because they're part of a bank holding company," he says, "they're better able to show us how to use their products to be more efficient and sell more to our customers."
Martire, who helped handle several deals at Fiserv, has been putting his M&A skills to work overtime at Metavante. M&I made four acquisitions on the tech unit's behalf last year, picking up new products as well as new customers. In May the bank completed the $157 million purchase of Kirchman Corp., a privately held, Orlando, Floridabased provider of software for banks that prefer to process transactions on their in-house computer systems. In other words, Metavante can now sell clients an option other than outsourcing -- an option that Fiserv and Jack Henry were already offering.
In July, M&I closed a $140 million cash deal for Oklahoma Citybased Advanced Financial Solutions, a provider of check-imaging technology -- a new niche for Metavante that positions it to compete for business generated by the Check Clearing for the 21st Century Act. In effect since October, the federal law, known as Check 21, allows banks to convert paper checks into digital images, which could drastically reduce labor costs and accelerate the movement of funds.
Also in July, M&I paid $610 million for Montvale, New Jerseybased NYCE Corp., a leading processor of ATM and debit card transactions. NYCE's majority owner, First Data Corp., of Greenwood Village, Colorado, had to divest the network to win regulators' approval for its $7 billion acquisition last February of Memphis, Tennesseebased transaction processor Concord EFS.
In November, M&I bought Addison, Texasbased Vectorsgi Holdings, another check-imaging company, from private equity firm Thomas Cressey Equity Partners for about $100 million in cash and up to $35 million in performance incentives. This month M&I expects to complete a deal it announced on December 29 to acquire Prime Associates, a Clark, New Jersey, provider of anti-money-laundering compliance systems, for an undisclosed sum.
The irony is not lost on Kuester that four years ago Metavante was hampered by its bank affiliation and its lack of a soaring stock price to use as an inflated bidding currency -- but that now, having an amply capitalized banking parent is not such a liability in competing for deals with pure tech companies. (Jack Henry trades today at a forward P/E of 22, Fiserv at 18.)
Yet spending some $1 billion on four rapid-fire acquisitions was a stretch even for M&I. The bank raised $400 million through a mandatory convertible bond offering in July and then followed up in late November with a $150 million stock issue. M&I's pristine capital ratios took a hit: The bank's tangible-equity-to-asset ratio slipped from 6.3 percent at the end of 2003 to 4.89 percent a year later. Seven percent is considered healthy for a typical regional bank, though M&I can get away with a lower figure because it relies on noncredit services, which are less capital-intensive, for a significant chunk of its revenues. Still, paying off that debt and restoring the capital ratios will no doubt require a breather from more major deals.
Metavante chief Martire expresses no regrets. "We had to seize the opportunities to add products and customers when they were available," he contends. "You can't always pick your moment."
Moreover, Metavante executives are right when they talk about reaping relationships. The Orlando software acquisition, Kirchman, brought fast-growing, $28 billion-in-assets Commerce Bancorp of Cherry Hill, New Jersey, into the Metavante fold. In November, $493 billion-in-assets Wachovia Corp., the fourth-biggest U.S. bank, signed on as a customer of newly acquired Advanced Financial Solutions. Vectorsgi, meanwhile, has relationships with 41 of the top 50 U.S. banks, including Wells Fargo & Co. and J.P. Morgan Chase.
Metavante's sales (counting, of course, the contribution from the recent acquisitions) have shot up an average 20 percent annually over the past three years. Martire is aiming for $1.2 billion in sales in 2005.
Even as Metavante flourishes, some skeptics warn that its core business of processing deposit accounts could lose momentum in coming years if the banking industry's continuing consolidation thins the ranks of the company's customers. (Metavante caters to roughly five out of every eight U.S. banks.)
M&I is "a better bank than most investors recognize," maintains veteran Piper Jaffray & Co. banking analyst Benjamin Crabtree. "But it's combined with a processing business that might not add as much growth and value as many investors think."
KBW's Konrad, however, believes Metavante is adjusting nicely to the changing market. Deposit processing remains "the core product from which it can cross-sell other products," he asserts. Konrad notes, moreover, that growth has exceeded expectations over the past two years and looks poised to continue to do so.
Although deposit processing is slow-growing, the other areas that Metavante has staked out for itself -- online payments, debit cards, check imaging -- have robust potential. In fact, because the profit margins on electronic transactions are wider than those of more-labor-intensive traditional payments, the trend away from paper could ultimately work in Metavante's favor.
This shift is already well under way: Federal Reserve Board data shows that the number of checks written in the U.S. peaked at about 50 billion in 1995 and fell to 36.7 billion in 2003 -- a year in which noncheck payments reached 44.5 billion. Spurred by the Check 21 law, more and more banks are expected to seek out the imaging technology of AFS and Vectorsgi.
The impact of bank consolidation is tougher to gauge. Most bank acquirers impose their existing processing systems on acquirees. But as First Manhattan Consulting's Dresner points out, it's "unknowable whether your customer base is going to be acquirers or sellers, so events beyond your control can have a big material impact on your business." KBW's Konrad hypothesizes that if the most active consolidators turn out to be banks with less than $10 billion in assets gobbling up smaller community banks, then Metavante should fare well, for it counts many of those would-be buyers as customers. If, on the other hand, big institutions with sizable technology operations, such as Cincinnati's Fifth Third Bancorp or Cleveland-based National City Corp., take out the banks in Metavante's sweet spot, M&I and its tech arm could be in for a lean time.
Martire says Metavante's greatest strength, and best defense, is its ability to attract new customers and diversify its income stream. Except for M&I itself, which accounts for 8 percent of Metavante's revenues, no single customer contributes more than 2 percent. "As we continue to grow, it dilutes the significance of any one client," notes Martire. "As we add clients, consolidation becomes less and less of a concern."
ARE M&I AND METAVANTE ULTIMATELY AN ODD couple? Is M&I too much a bank to reap the maximum benefits of its tech subsidiary? Conversely, is Metavante too tied to its banking roots to flourish as a technology vendor?
In contemplating these issues, it's useful to put aside the tech business for a moment and examine M&I the bank. The real secret of this nearly 160-year-old institution may be the extraordinary way that it does bread-and-butter banking -- or, as M&I's slogan puts it, "banking the way it was meant to be."
Consider M&I's banking core: deposit-taking and lending. Over the past five years, its noninterest-bearing deposits have grown at a steady 8 percent average annual clip, about par for the industry.
Meanwhile, its commercial loan volume has been climbing at a 10 percent average annual pace -- 18 percent in 2004 alone. The bank has cherry-picked corporate accounts to extract the worst risks, and its overall nonperforming loan ratio has fallen more than 40 percent since 2003's first quarter, to 0.45 percent of outstanding loans as of December 31. Even more impressive is M&I's loan charge-off rate last year of 0.11 percent, down from 0.21 percent in 2003. Most top-50 U.S. banks with a comparable loan portfolio do well to have charge-offs of between 0.25 and 0.50 percent.
M&I's loan model should have little trouble riding out the next big downturn. Commercial loans and leases make up about 30 percent of the bank's $29.5 billion loan portfolio; the remainder is distributed among commercial real estate (32 percent), home equity loans and credit lines (17 percent), residential mortgages (15 percent) and other consumer loans (6 percent).
M&I Bank's all-important efficiency ratio -- costs as a proportion of revenue -- has also been declining favorably. It reached 47 percent in the fourth quarter, or 3 points below the threshold that defines a high-productivity bank. That metric was 52.5 as recently as September 2003. Include Metavante, and the holding company's efficiency ratio swells to 61.6, although that is only to be expected of a processing business that has disproportionately high overhead.
Small-business and middle-market business customers appreciate that M&I's bankers tend to stay put and get to know their companies intimately. M&I trusts its bankers to be able to tell the difference between a fatal flaw in a borrower's strategy and a cyclical hiccup, and that helps inspire customer loyalty.
Cultivating client relationships is crucial to Kuester. He confides that he and M&I Bank president Furlong spend much of their time "in hard hats or hair nets" at plants. In October the CEO spent a week in China touring M&I clients' factories. "It was a matter of gaining some better understanding and credibility," he says.
Clients say they like the stability and depth of M&I relationships. Aring Equipment Co., a $100 million-in-sales construction equipment dealer in the Milwaukee suburb of Butler, banked with M&I for 35 years but in 1985 jumped to another institution for a better rate. Six years later Aring returned to M&I. "We determined that price wasn't always the most important consideration," says Aring president James Hock. "They understand our business better than any other bank." (M&I's closest competitor in Wisconsin is Minneapolis-based U.S. Bancorp, which controls 13.4 percent of deposits in the state, 3.9 percentage points behind market leader M&I.)
Aring has a $36 million credit line with M&I and uses the bank's cash management services. M&I also manages Aring's 401(k) plan. Hock says other lenders have offered to undercut M&I's rates by 20 basis points or more, "but the service and overall relationship weren't there." Hock recommends M&I to his clients and other local businesses. "It sounds hokey," he says, "but they're truly our partners."
Yet as diligent as M&I may be in catering to credit clients, it is the rare banking company that earns less than half of its income from interest on loans. Instead, M&I garnered 55 percent of its revenues last year from fees. The industry average is about 37 percent. And 62 percent of the fee income came from Metavante. (Trust services accounted for 10 percent, and the rest was from service charges on deposit accounts, mortgage banking fees and other sources.)
M&I's nontechnology growth engine, its private bank, saw assets under management rise 21 percent in 2004, to $18.3 billion. That high-net-worth business -- much of it in the sunny climes of Arizona, Florida and Nevada -- chips in about 7 percent of profits, or nearly $44 million in 2004.
Kuester's most sweeping change in banking, though, has been to extend M&I's reach beyond "slow-growth Wisconsin," as he calls it. M&I spent $1 billion in 2001 and 2002 to buy three small-business banks in Minneapolis as well as $2.1 billion-in-assets Mississippi Valley Bancshares, in St. Louis. In Arizona, M&I has 34 branches, $2.8 billion in loans and $1.5 billion in deposits; it entered the market in 1986 by purchasing Thunderbird Capital Corp., which then had $205 million in assets.
Could M&I and Metavante prosper without each other? Probably, but why should they? Although Kuester won't rule out the possibility of taking his tech unit public or hiving it off, he argues that synergies within M&I's financial institutions group "have made Metavante a more integral part of our corporate strategy." It follows, he adds, that "there would be greater reluctance to consider spinning it off."
What's more, M&I's stock is at 2.5 times book value, and its market capitalization is $9.6 billion. That's sufficient to keep potential acquirers at bay -- even though superregionals Charter One Financial Corp. of Cleveland ($44 billion in assets), SouthTrust Corp. of Birmingham, Alabama ($52 billion), and Union Planters Corp. of Memphis ($32 billion) have all sold out to bigger financial institutions in the past 12 months.
M&I, says KBW's Konrad, "has so much momentum, that the price would have to be pretty high to convince them to sell." Still, as was the case in the early 1980s, M&I could use some luck to complement the good planning and management.
