Wells Fargo Shifting Previous “Knock-On Results” of Financial institution Scandal, Seems to Go on Offense

June 2, 2021

wolterke – stock.adobe.com

Wells Fargo CEO Charlie Scharf said Wednesday that the bank, including its wealth management business, is now on the offensive after “the aftermath” of bad press over the company’s banking scandals with fake consumer accounts subsided.

“We were extremely distracted as a company,” said Scharf at the Bernstein 37th Annual Strategic Decisions Conference. If you look at everyone who works “day in and day out with customers”, “they weren’t really offended in any way, shape or form”.

“It was a defense,” said Scharf, who took over as CEO in October 2019, adding that the company will “nudge” its path to focus on growth rather than addressing the problems of the past.

Scharf’s remarks come a week before the first face-to-face meeting of the Wells Fargo Operations Committee, which the bank chief put together last year primarily through the hiring of 10 of his 18 members from other companies. They’re also coming because Wells’ Wealth and Investment Management department has undergone a multi-year reorganization that has created uncertainty among some executives in the field.

But Scharf has been shining the spotlight on the San Francisco Bank’s wealth management business over the past few weeks, giving some pointers to the company’s strategy at a conference in May when he said he expected the business to be better off the high net worth Mass customers can capitalize on the consumer base.

“We have people in the consumer banks who are wealthy, not very wealthy, but wealthy and have considerable sums of money to invest, and we just haven’t used the wealth we have,” Scharf told an online audience on May 19 at the Wells Fargo Financial Services Investor Conference, as per the transcript from Sentieo, a finance and corporate research platform.

Wells Fargo’s competitors have embraced this type of proprietary brokerage opportunity and “done so well,” added Scharf.

Scharf did not identify competitors by name, but his bank’s own wirehouse competitors have been promoting closer ties between banks and brokers for years.

For years, executives at Bank of America and its subsidiary Merrill Lynch have emphasized the profitability of cross-selling banking and wealth management clients. Merrill President Andrew Sieg recently promoted the parent bank’s client acquisition pool, identifying more than 3 million Bank of America clients with net worth in excess of $ 1 million, more than three times his brokerage firm’s 850,000 existing clients.

Prior to the Wells fake account scandal in 2016, the company had also pushed for more cross-selling between its businesses, but it stopped reporting the number of banking products per wealth customer in its quarterly results to keep the wealth business out of the aftermath and Aggression to distance sales culture.

However, these ghosts still haunt the company. During Scharf’s conversation on May 19, an analyst noticed that Scharf had not used the word “cross-selling” specifically and asked, “I was just wondering if there is any sensitivity to it?”

“Yes and no,” replied Scharf, noting that the strategy with “the right controls” made sense.

“This is not about cross-selling. It’s not about setting the necessary goals or numbers, ”said Scharf. “We have a limited but important range of products, and the point is to adequately serve customers in each of these areas.”

Sure, some of the cleanup is still going on, even after Wells Fargo reached $ 3 million with state regulators last year to resolve some of the cross-sell claims.

Wells Fargo terminated several former bank-based advisors this year after conducting a review of decades of insurance sales and discovering that they had mistakenly received referral credits for policies that were canceled shortly after they were issued.

It is also still in the process of shutting down its international wealth business and expanding its sales force, which has declined by nearly 2,000 net from 15,086 to 13,277 (including several hundred private bankers and banking advisors who joined late last year).

As a sign of health, Scharf reported on Wednesday that Wells Fargo increased its forecast for revenue-related spending for 2021 from $ 500 million to $ 900 million, based largely on asset management costs – specifically brokerage commissions. The cost increases are “a good thing,” added Scharf quickly, “because our revenues are higher and we like the margins and returns in our asset management business.”

He also said Wells Fargo will “roll out a new mobile application” by early 2022.

A Wells Fargo spokesman had no answer at press time when asked if the new mobile application tools would be available to wealth management firms, but said the broker accounts had been built into previous versions of such tools.

-Mason Braswell contributed to this story.