Little looks likely to change at Wells Fargo despite realignment at the top.

Observers see little changing in the Southland at Wells Fargo & Co. despite the announcement last month that the San Francisco-based banking giant's Chairman and CEO Carl Reichardt will retire at year-end and his longtime president, Paul Hazen, will succeed him.

"Wells has already got a superb management team in Los Angeles," noted Don Livingstone, western regional banking practice director at accounting firm Arthur Andersen & Co.'s downtown L.A. office.

"Hazen and Reichardt were absolutely driven by the same goals," Livingstone said. "I don't see Paul forsaking them just to show he's doing something different than Carl."

Hal Nathan, a former senior financial economist at Wells Fargo and now senior portfolio manager with San Francisco-based GMG/Seneca Capital Management, agreed with that assessment.

"I don't think Hazen is going to do anything revolutionary. He got the formula from Reichardt," Nathan noted. That formula, he added, has taken the 128-year-old company's stock from $13.44 a share when Reichardt became CEO in 1982 to $158.75 on the day he announced his retirement.

Any changes in the banking operation, Nathan said, would be driven by the market. If stock prices remain stable, there won't be any changes. But "if he feels things are going awry, he might move very fast," Nathan added.

"The bank's well-positioned to take advantage of the state's improving economy," commented Mark Zandi, chief economist for Regional Financial Associates, Inc., who follows western banks for the West Chester, Pa.-based consulting firm.

The real estate sector of the Southland economy will be a factor in the firm's destiny, Zandi predicted. "Because Hazen has an understanding of the real estate market, he can be expected to direct resources in that direction."

At the beginning of his Wells Fargo career, Paul Hazen was a Los Angeles name himself. He joined his former Union Bank colleague, University of Southern California alumnus Carl Reichardt, as vice president of Wells Fargo Realty Advisors, a one-time local subsidiary of the company.

Since then, he has risen with Reichardt through every level of the company's management. "I've often heard of Carl saying he has the charisma and Paul has the brains," recalled Wells' Los Angeles spokeswoman, Kathy Shilkret.

In 1986 Wells Fargo acquired Crocker National Bank, with Hazen working through the details of the deal. "Hazen was the prime architect of the Crocker acquisition, probably the best acquisition in banking history," Livingstone noted.