The people who build a city are rarely the ones the banks trust. A.P. Giannini understood this. He had grown up watching it. By 1899, he had turned his stepfather's commission house into the largest in San Francisco — traveling his territory on foot, knowing every vendor, every laborer, every man who woke before dawn to get a fair price for what his hands had made. He was thirty years old. He understood credit not as a product but as an act of recognition. To loan a man money was to say: I see you. I see what you are building. I believe you will pay me back.
The directors of the Columbus Savings & Loan did not share this belief. They preferred a different kind of customer. A.P. quit the board.
On October 17, 1904, he opened the Bank of Italy in a converted saloon on Montgomery Avenue — the street that would one day carry Columbus's name — in the heart of North Beach. The first day's deposits totaled almost nine thousand dollars. Within a year, they would exceed seven hundred thousand. The immigrants of this neighborhood, the ones other banks sent away, had been waiting for exactly this.
Then the earth moved.
BRICKS & SWEAT: WHY IT MATTERS
“He set up a plank across two barrels in front of his house and began making loans. On handshakes. On character. Every one was repaid.”
The 1906 earthquake came before dawn. The fires followed. A.P. loaded the bank's vault into a garbage wagon and drove it home, disguised among the ordinary commerce of the street. While the great banks waited for their vaults to cool, he set up a plank across two barrels and began lending money. On handshakes. On character. Every one was repaid.
He introduced branch banking to California in 1909. He bought banks across the state, built networks of trust where others had built only walls. He loaned Walt Disney the money to make Snow White — the first full-length animated film in American history — when no one else would. He bought the bonds that built the Golden Gate Bridge during the Depression. He provided the capital that helped form Hewlett-Packard. He founded Transamerica Corporation.
In 1928, the Bank of Italy merged with Bank of America. A.P. chaired it until 1945. He died in 1949, at seventy-nine, having made himself wealthy only in the ways a man of his particular character is ever truly wealthy: in the trust of strangers, repaid.
