Credit cards are first Wells Fargo products rolled out to Wachovia customers

Wells Fargo executives see a lot of potential for the credit card division to grow with the Wachovia merger.

Now, 15 percent of Wachovia's retail bank customers have a credit card with the bank. That compares with 36 percent of legacy Wells Fargo bank customers who have one.

"So we think there is tremendous opportunity for legacy Wachovia customers to benefit," said Mike McCoy, who works from West Des Moines and is president of Wells Fargo Consumer Credit Card.

To ensure it takes advantage of those opportunities, the company is turning to Steve Samuelson, leader of the integration team for the Consumer Credit Card division — one of about 20 teams throughout Wells Fargo with the task of merging the company's technological and operational systems.

He has 30 to 40 full-time employees and hundreds of others who work on the merger at least part time. "We call on a lot of Wachovia employees. They are very much at the table," said Samuelson, who heads to Charlotte, N.C., from Des Moines about once a month to see employees there.

The division is finishing timelines and planning for merging, Samuelson said. Execution of the plans begins in earnest in November and will continue through much of 2010 and 2011.

"The merger is a great opportunity to grow the business, and it is an opportunity for team members to be building something special," he said. "A lot of times people talk about having new challenges and opportunities, and this really is a chance to step up and take on something new."

Samuelson, who worked on the integration of Norwest and Wells Fargo in 1998, said the company "dusted off that playbook and applied the same type of tried and true principles." He said that merger was successful because the focus on the customer.

It helps that the banks weren't that far apart. "Considering the size and complexities of the two businesses and the success that both have had before the merger, there are far fewer differences than you might think," he said.

Credit cards will be one of the first Wells Fargo-branded items distributed to Wachovia customers. Credit cards will be distributed as cards expire, or get lost or stolen and as new credit card customers sign up after April, he said.Most of the work before April is on the technical side, getting the programs and processes aligned and ready to distribute cards.

For Samuelson, though, the work that goes into the integration is supposed to be invisible.

"The customer didn't ask us to do this merger," Samuelson said. "So our goal is to make this as seamless as possible from a consumer perspective."