Happy warrior.(Statistical Data Included)

George A. Schaefer Jr. is the banking industry's Donald Rumsfeld. Both have that somewhat stodgy Midwest mien, but both are plenty tough and, to use an apt clich, they say what they mean and mean what they say. Behind their steel-framed lenses, their eyes are incisive, choosing what is important and aiming their weapons directly at the target. "Banking is like guerrilla warfare," Schaefer says in an interview with U.S. Banker.

And just as America is brilliantly conducting the war in Afghanistan, Schaefer's Cincinnati-based Fifth Third Bancorp is tearing up the ground wherever it chooses to go. For years, Fifth Third - whose stock has been selling at a whopping 34 times earnings - had hewed to the fairly narrow corridors along Routes I-75 and I-71. But in recent years it has been spreading much further afield, recently having moved into such cities as Chicago and Detroit. What's more, Fifth Third's assets have grown to $70 billion, from only $20.5 billion in 1996.

The question is whether Schaefer will be able to sustain Fifth Third's sinewy culture as the company gets bigger and spreads its wings. That is the question the 56-year-old Schaefer addresses in the following interview with U.S. Banker Editor-in-Chief Robert A. Bennett.

USB: Now that you're going into a number of big cities, such as Chicago and Detroit, is the character of Fifth Third changing?

SCHAEFER: No. We are trying to replicate in Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Indianapolis and Louisville exactly what we did in Cincinnati over the last 20 years.

USB: Aren't Chicago and Detroit very different than cities in Ohio?

SCHAEFER: No. This weekend Ohio State plays Michigan - there's not a lot of difference in that Midwestern culture. Yes, Detroit's got a little more auto, a little more of certain types of ethnic groups; Chicago's a huge melting pot. But we're not in Chicago per se, we're in a whole bunch of different neighborhoods. We're in the Sears Tower, and we have a hundred offices in other parts of greater Chicago. So, if we're in Elmhurst or Rolling Meadows, is that different than Blue Ash, Ohio, or the western suburbs of Louisville? Not really.

Sometimes people forget that we have 130 offices in greater Cincinnati. Well, depending on whether you're 20 miles down in the hollers of Kentucky, or you're in downtown Cincinnati, you've got that same divergence.

USB: In a recent interview, you told me that one of your strengths is that you have a small share of most of the markets in which you operate, which gives you a lot of room for growth.

SCHAEFER: Exactly. In Chicago we have 3.6% of the deposit share. Another way of looking at it is that we don't have 96.4% of the market. In Detroit, we have 2.6% of the greater metropolitan market. And, of course, investors today are looking for growth companies. The markets don't want to hear that you have 100% of the business in Ohio. They want to know your growth rate over the next 20 years. So we've got a much better shot at good growth with only 6% of the market.

USB: Was that becoming a problem in areas where you've always been, such as Ohio?

SCHAEFER: No, I don't think so. We have about 940 branch offices and we'd like to grow them 20% to 30% next year. We don't have a dominant share in any particular area. Even in Cincinnati or Dayton, where we would have big shares, say 30%, that still leaves us with 70% to capture. That's a lot of potential.

I'm giving you the deposit market share. If you looked at the investment advisory business, our share's probably much less. I would bet we don't have 10% of the money that's managed in Cincinnati if you include Merrill Lynch, Fidelity and Vanguard, and all the investment houses.

USB: With a bunch of independently run banks, it seems that you're running Fifth Third very much the way the old Bank One was run before it started expanding and before it became centralized. Do you agree?

SCHAEFER: Exactly. We like that "uncommon partnership" model. Bank One was really tough when it had separate banks in Dayton and Columbus and Indianapolis. Everybody in those cities reported to the…