Walter Wriston, who died Wednesday of pancreatic cancer at age 85, helped revolutionize the commercial banking industry by vastly increasing international banking, introducing technological innovations, and expanding the scope of financial services offered by banks.

As chairman and CEO of Citibank for 17 years, Wriston was the most powerful banker in New York and possibly the world during the 1970s.

In 1967, shortly after being named chief executive, Wriston oversaw the reorganization of First National City Bank into specialized units. In 1968,the newly renamed Citibank was made a subsidiary of Citicorp, a holding company that allowed Citi to diversify into financial services not formerly permitted to banks, such as mortgage banking, consumer credit, and real estate development. Wriston’s vision of the bank as a “supermarket” of financial services went on to dominate the industry.

Already a leader in international banking, Citi under Wriston’s leadership expanded to 91 countries and became by far the most prolific private lender to foreign nations. When, in later years, debt repayment became an issue with some countries, Wriston defended continued lending on the grounds that, historically, nations seldom defaulted.

As one of the most visible bankers of his era, Wriston spoke out against government intervention in the economy and testified several times before Congress to defend his expanded vision of Citibank’s future.

Most saliently for today’s electronic world, Wriston early realized that technology would change the way banking was done. Under his leadership, Citibank made an unprecedented $170 million investment to develop its own ATMs. It introduced them in 1977 with a catchy slogan that helped make them popular: “The Citi never sleeps.” The ATM was unveiled after a 17-inch snowfall that had made it tough for consumers to get to banks on time.

“My life was designed to solve problems,” Wriston once told a reporter.

Wriston was born in Connecticut, and grew up in Appleton, Wis., where his father, the historian Henry Merritt Wriston, was president of Lawrence College. Henry went on to become the long-term president of Brown University, whose official history says, “Perhaps no president this century has made as great an impact on the mission and form of the institution as Wriston.”

Walter Wriston’s mother was a chemistry teacher who maintained a strict Methodist household. Wriston edited the college paper at Wesleyan and then went to Tuft University’s Fletcher School of International Law and Diplomacy. In 1942, Wriston started work at the State Department as a junior foreign service officer. With a war on, it was an exciting time to be involved in international diplomacy, and Wriston helped negotiate the exchange of Japanese internees for American prisoners held in Japan.

After being drafted into the Army, Wriston was assigned to shore defense on what he called the “New York Archepelago” – Staten Island, Sandy Hook, and the islands around New York Harbor. In 1945, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Signal Corps and served on the Philippine island of Cebu, where he operated an encoding machine. It was the beginning of a lifelong fascination with information technology.

With the end of World War II, Wriston intended to return to the State Department, but the premature death of his mother made him want to take a job nearer to Providence, R.I., where his father had become Brown’s president. After finding New York a tough job market – demobilization made for a very competitive environment – Wriston finally landed a job as a junior auditor at First National City Bank, which he said was “on top” of his “list of everything dull.”

After chafing under routine work but impressing his superiors, Wriston was made personal assistant to George Moore, who was put in charge of expanding Citibank’s international operations. Moore would go on to be president and chairman of the bank.

In 1956, Wriston was named head of the European district; three years later, he was leading the entire overseas division.

Because each nation has its own banking laws, an international banking operation is an exceedingly complex bureaucracy. Wriston sought the brightest young bankers he could find and gave them big responsibilities. According to Wriston’s biographer, Phillip Zweig, the management consultant Peter Drucker said that “Wriston’s commitment to recruiting women as managers was his most significant and lasting contribution to American business.”

So predominant was Citibank in overseas banking that it effectively trained an entire generation of international bankers, many of whom went on to head operations for other banks.

In 1961, Wriston helped develop the negotiable certificate of deposit to garner corporate deposits in denominations of $100,000 or greater by offering interest rates a point or two higher than normal deposits for a fixed term. By effectively bidding for corporate money, the instrument “totally changed the face of banking,” Business Week magazine said in 1973.

By the time Wriston was named president of First National City, in 1967, the bank was poised to surpass Chase Manhattan as the nation’s second-largest financial institution. In his first year, Wriston undertook a massive restructuring of the bank into four groups concentrating on personal, commercial, corporate, and international banking, plus a fifth group concentrating on financial services.

Citibank was made a subsidiary of Citicorp in 1968, and Wriston became president and CEO of that entity as well. Citicorp began offering data processing, mortgage banking, real-estate development, and consumer credit. Except for objections by the Federal Reserve, it would also have gone into the insurance and mutual fund business. Wriston set the corporate goal of increasing profits by 15% annually, and missed the goal only once in the 1970s, in the recession year of 1975. In Wriston’s office hung a portrait of Thomas Gresham, the 16th-century financier famous for the phrase “bad money drives out good.”

In 1984, when Wriston retired – he called his mandatory retirement at age 65 “statutory senility” – Citicorp had assets of $150 billion, net income of $890 million, and 71,000 employees in 41 states and 91 countries. Each of these figures represented several multiples of what they had been when he took over.

As a debt crisis for developing nations began to become apparent in the early 1980s, it was Wriston more than any other banker who was identified with continuing to lend money to them. He refused to be contrite, holding that it was all part of supply and demand. “Am I going to make a U-turn and say free markets are bad?” the New York Times quoted him as saying. “Not on your life.”

In the early 1990s, Citibank would be driven to the brink of insolvency, in part because of nonperforming developing nation loans. But as the international economy rebounded, so did Citibank.

Wriston, by his own account, had been asked to be secretary of the Treasury by Presidents Nixon and Ford. In the 1980s, he served for several years on President Reagan’s Presidential Economic Advisory Board. Although he was clearly interested in serving in the Cabinet or as an ambassador, he was never tapped, perhaps because of a perception that his association with the debt crisis would make for difficult questions in congressional confirmation hearings.

In retirement, Wriston wrote two books, “Risk and Other Four Letter Words”(1986) and “The Twilight of Sovereignty” (1992), in which he predicted that the revolution in information technology would lead to the decline in importance of national boundaries and change the nature of the corporation.

Wriston became an important donor and backer to the Manhattan Institute, which named a lecture series after him. In 2004, Wriston was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom; he was already too ill with the cancer that would kill him to attend the White House ceremony.

An inveterate tinkerer since his youth, Wriston maintained a tree farm in southern Connecticut, where he kept a small fleet of tractors running. He was a competitive doubles tennis player until cancer slowed him, and continued to visit his office each day until recently.

Wriston was famous for aphoristic formulations that seemed to sum up his philosophy in just a few words. One of his best went, “Judgment comes from experience – and experience comes from bad judgment.”

Walter Bigelow Wriston

Born August 3, 1919, in Middletown, Conn.; died January 19 at the New York Presbyterian Hospital New York Weill Cornell Center of pancreatic cancer; predeceased by his first wife, Barbara Brengle; survived by his wife, Kathy Dineen, his daughter, Catherine, and two grandchildren.