Although the bank has eliminated sales goals for retail staff, Stumpf said “cross-selling” products from various businesses to customers is still important to growing its business.
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“Because of the severity of these violations, Wells Fargo is paying the largest penalty the [Consumer Financial Protection Bureau] has ever imposed”. He said that the 5,300 people who were fired included “bankers, branch managers – and in some cases managers of those managers”.
Specifically, approximately 5,300 employees may have opened roughly 1.5 million deposit accounts, transferring funds from consumers’ accounts to temporarily fund the new, unauthorized accounts.
“But I will show up there next Tuesday, and I’m looking forward – or I surely are gonna be prepared to answer their questions”, he said.
Stumpf began speaking out publicly for the first time since the controversy thrust the San Francisco-based bank into the spotlight. The ratio hovers around six, which means every Wells Fargo household has, on average, six different types of products with the bank.
“It’s bad behavior they were correct to take action against”, Lew said at the CNBC Institutional Investor Delivering Alpha Conference in NY.
The news comes just one day after several of the Senate Banking Committee’s prominent Democrats, including Sen.
Stumpf on CNBC Tuesday said he regretted the unauthorized accounts, and denied there was a problem with the culture at the bank. “It’s tailed off since then”, he said.
Lew’s remarks came as Wells Fargo announced that employees would no longer have product sales goals starting January 1.
In an attempt to combat the huge amount of bad PR, Wells Fargo announced this week that they would be ending the competitive sales goals which plagued employees, ending the requirements which ultimately led to the illegal behavior.
While Wells Fargo could still technically try to “clawback” some of Tolstedt’s payday to offset the costs of its fines, Fortune reported the bank was unlikely to do so.
Last year, as executive vice president of the division, Tolstedt made $9 million in total pay, a reward for “continued growth in primary checking customers” and other metrics.
He said the bank will “take a big wide fresh look at who knew what and when and what else might have been done”. We will make them as carefully and consistently as we can. “Today is another move along that continuum”.
The US Senate Banking Committee has scheduled a hearing on Well Fargo for next week at which Stumpf is expected to testify. Before the hearing, Wells Fargo officials said they would hold briefings about the incident on Capitol Hill. He said the board of directors would have to decide whether any executives should have to give back their bonuses.
Wells Fargo “faced or settled four key areas of litigation as of the end of 2015”, the newspaper found, including Federal Housing Administration insurance claims, Visa and MasterCard interchange fees, mortgage products and order of posting (overdraft) fees.
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Under her supervision, many employees were creating fake accounts for current customers and even forging their signatures. “And I’m leading this company and leading it forward through this”.
