At the conference Tuesday the bank said its review of millions of accounts showed that in as many as 1.5 million deposit accounts and 565,000 credit card accounts, “we could not rule out the possibility that an account was unauthorized”.
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“I believe we remain a growth company because our focus is on these long-term relationships”.
The bank’s shares fell 3.9 percent to $46.64 at 2:18 p.m.in NY, the worst performance in the 24-company KBW Bank Index. Comparatively, Wells Fargo fell to $237.8 billion.
Stumpf, the long-time chief executive of Wells Fargo, defended the mega bank in an interview Tuesday, saying the institution is working to stamp out bad behavior after revelations that thousands of employees secretly created accounts customers didn’t ask for in order to meet sales goals.
Wells Fargo, which is grappling with the fallout from claims that its employees created fake customer accounts, slumped 3.3 per cent, reduced the firm’s market value to $US236.9 billion.
Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf has accepted an invitation to testify, a spokesperson for the bank told CNNMoney.
He said the bank will “take a big wide fresh look at who knew what and when and what else might have been done”.
They all worked in Ms. Tolstedt’s community banking division, the company said. The controversy has led to calls for the bank to claw back bonuses paid to her. A Wells Fargo spokeswoman said Tolstedt was not fired, but “made a decision to retire at the end of this year”.
In one of her early high-profile jobs, Mack in 2003 led an initiative that promoted referrals between bank divisions that Wachovia estimated could produce $500 million to $600 million in new revenues over five years.
Stumpf did not comment on whether claw-back provisions would be instituted for Tolstedt’s pay.
Wells Fargo has forgotten that a bank is not a social experimentation petri dish.
“A trusted colleague and dear friend, Carrie Tolstedt has been one of our most valuable Wells Fargo leaders, a standard-bearer of our culture, a champion for our customers, and a role model for responsible, principled and inclusive leadership”, said Chairman and CEO John Stumpf at the time.
Torrie Matous, spokeswoman for the committee’s chairman, Richard Shelby, a Republican from Alabama, said staff had “been arranging briefings and collecting information from both Wells Fargo and the regulators” to prepare for a September 20 hearing. Bob Menendez, D-NJ; Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio; Jack Reed, D-R.I.; and Jeff Merkley, D-Ore.; the Democrats request immediate committee hearings to investigate the matter further.
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The top Democrat on the banking committee, Ohio’s Senator Sherrod Brown, wants the panel to probe deeper than a single hearing, “so we can get answers on how this massive fraud happened, what’s being done to make customers whole, and how to put safeguards in place to protect against its recurrence”.
