It boils down to this: if something has less than eight appendages, it’s cool; greater than eight or more is to be avoided.

“Our business is really pretty simple,” Sloan, 50, said in an interview last week at the bank’s San Francisco headquarters. “When you look at the deal and its structure looks like an octopus or a spider, just don’t do it. That kept us out of a lot of things.”

Wells Fargo’s Sloan Avoids Spiders, Octopuses in Rise to CFO [Bloomberg]