Bankers Trust was bought by Deutsche Bank for $10 billion in 1998 in the largest foreign takeover of an American bank at the time.  A frequent spokesman for the industry, Mr. Brittain represented major banks in contentious, and very public, negotiations with Mayor Abraham D. Beame and labor unions during New York City’s fiscal crisis in 1977. Mr. Brittain was a soft-spoken and understated executive, prompting some bank officers to complain that they sometimes could hardly hear him talk. He made a point of eating with employees regularly at the company cafeteria. “I get a lot of good gossip at those lunches,” he once told an interviewer.  “When I started here 32 years ago, bankers were doing business on the golf course,” Mr. Brittain said in another interview, in 1979. “That has all but disappeared.”  Alfred Brittain 3d was born in 1922 in Evanston, Ill., the Chicago suburb. His father was a vice president of the Bank of New York. He graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in 1941, served in the Army during World War II in the Pacific and graduated from Yale University in 1947. He joined Bankers Trust that same year as a credit investigator.  Mr. Brittain was a director of Philip Morris for 25 years, until 1991. From 1982 to 1985 he was a director of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He retired from Bankers Trust in 1987 at the mandatory retirement age of 65.  Mr. Brittain was an avid sailor as a member of the Riverside Yacht Club in Greenwich; as a boy he sailed on Lake Michigan in a 15 1/2-foot boat called Slopoke that his father had built from discarded wood, Mr. Hampton said. His office on Park Avenue had a teak desk and half a dozen paintings of sailboats.  Mr. Brittain is survived by his wife, May McDonnell Brittain, whom he married in 1996, and two children from a first marriage, Stephen and Linda.  His first wife, Beatrice Brittain, whom he married in 1948, died in 1988. His second wife, Lilly Middleton Hampton, whom he married in 1991, died in 1993. He is also survived by four granddaughters and six stepchildren.  A version of this article appears in print on March 12, 2011, on Page B8 of the New York edition with the headline: Alfred Brittain, 88; Reshaped Bankers Trust. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
Mr. Brittain, who became Bankers Trust’s top executive in 1975, sold retail branches and expanded what became a very lucrative merchant-banking business.