Executive Vice President, Technology and Operations
Wells Fargo & Co.
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In 2006, on her way to becoming one of the highest-ranking women in banking, Avid Modjtabai was director of human resources for San Francisco–based Wells Fargo & Co., overseeing a workforce of 160,000. Little did she know what bigger challenges were to come. Modjtabai, who a few years earlier ran the bank’s well-regarded Internet services group, became chief information officer in 2007. Early in 2009, just as Wells and Wachovia Corp. launched the biggest-ever postmerger integration in financial services, she added responsibility for operations. The 49-year-old executive vice president, a former McKinsey & Co. consultant and an 18-year Wells Fargo veteran, reports to chairman and CEO John Stumpf. Now at $1.2 trillion in assets, with 280,000 employees, 9,000 offices and 70 million customers (19.4 million active online and 5.5 million using mobile devices), Wells represents “a whole new dimension of complexity” that, Modjtabai says, could not be managed without “the best operations and technology team in corporate America.” It runs some 4,000 applications and a network Modjtabai equates with that of “a midsize telco.” The online customers initiate 2 billion sessions annually and “multiples of that number of transactions,” she notes. “And that is just one of our channels.”
