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TWST: Could you begin by giving us a brief overview of Fifth Third Bancorp (Nasdaq:FITB)? Then describe what the business is like today.

Mr. Schaefer: Fifth Third Bancorp is a diversified financial services company headquartered in Cincinnati. We operate 14 affiliate banks, primarily in Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana. We also have operations in Florida and Arizona and have some offices in Illinois and Michigan as we branch out from our affiliate banks. We offer a broad array of financial products through our four primary businesses: commercial banking; retail banking; our investment advisory group that includes our trust group and also includes our brokerage and private banking operations; and then Midwest Payment Systems, which is the bank’s data processing subsidiary. We’ve got about $43 billion in assets now. At the end of the year, we were the 22nd largest bank in the country by asset size. In 1999 we were 18th if you ranked us by net income. If you ranked us by market capitalization or market net worth, we ranked ninth at the end of the year out of the commercial banks in the country.

TWST: Reflect for a moment on your tenure with Fifth Third. What over the past five years has been the major focus in your mind? Give us a report card on yourself. Do you feel at this point you’ve met the challenges that you have set for yourself? Looking ahead, what do you see on that agenda for the next two years?

Mr. Schaefer: I became President of the bank in 1989 and since I took over, we’ve tried to stay very focused on our four core businesses in the three states that we operate in. Our basic underlying business on the net interest income side is loan making and deposit gathering, which is a pretty simple business. We buy money at 4% and we sell it at 8%. We like the commercial side of the business when interest rates are high, and we like the consumer side when interest rates are low. We’re never sure which way the interest rates are going, so we balance those about 50-50, which makes up about two-thirds of our income statement. The other third is our fee businesses, one of which is our trust and investment advisory group. We’re about $170 billion of assets. We actively manage about $23 billion of those assets. Also, we are the largest EFT processor in the country now through our Midwest Payment Systems where we do a lot of ATM driving and a lot of merchant processing which includes credit card processing as well as debit card processing and electronic benefits transfer. Those are basically our core businesses. We’ve stayed very focused on those businesses and have just continued to add share in our three-state market. Even with those statistics that I mentioned earlier regarding size, we still have less than 10% of the deposit share in Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana. We’ve still got plenty of room to grow in our three main states before we venture off into the rest of the lower 48.