“We are eliminating product sales goals because we want to make certain our customers have full confidence that our retail bankers are always focused on the best interests of customers”, CEO John Stumpf said. “The [bank’s] incentive structure is flawed”, he says, explaining that deviant practices could occur if top management ties employee rewards to signing up existing customers to more products and services.
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Wells Fargo will eliminate its product sales targets by January 1, it said in a brief statement Tuesday.
He added that Wells Fargo’s headaches are also “quickly becoming a political problem” for big banks in general, providing critics “more ammunition to argue that mega banks are unmanageable”.
Wells Fargo has forgotten that a bank is not a social experimentation petri dish.
Wells Fargo allegedly allowed the widespread illegal practice of secretly opening up credit card and deposit accounts in consumers’ names.
“As Wells Fargo begins the long process of identifying and making restitution to the consumers who were defrauded, I want to ensure that seniors – who are often the targets of fraud and who also can be harder to find and make whole – are adequately protected”, the senators said in a letter to CFPB Director Richard Cordray. That includes the years from 2011 to 2015, when more than 5% of the employees under her watch engaged in a wide-ranging, systematic scheme to boost revenue by taking advantage of millions of unwitting customers.
The terminations – about 1 percent of the employees in each store – took place over the past five years. The employees created phony email addresses to enroll existing customers in online-banking services, for example, and issued them debit cards they didn’t request.
In its settlement with the CFPB – in which it didn’t admit or deny any wrongdoing – the bank revealed that 5,300 employees have been fired, and that customers paid more than $2.6 million in bogus fees. Customer interactions “were not handled as they should have been”, he said.
It seems like the culture at Wells Fargo is corrupt.
Walking the talk? Sure, Wells Fargo repeatedly receives high rankings from the Human Rights Campaign, the largest LGBT advocacy group and political lobbying organization in the United States. This acquisition will create even more value for our customers and will benefit employees as they become part of one of the largest and most reputable fund administrators.’ The transaction is subject to approvals by relevant regulatory authorities and other customary closing conditions.
“There’s a lot of talk in Washington these days about rolling back Dodd-Frank, about rolling back the law, changing the law that created the agency that uncovered and took action against this”, Lew said Tuesday in an interview on CNBC.
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Given that 5,300 employees, not just a handful of bad actors, were fired for what boils down to identity theft for profit, Wells Fargo would be better served serving its goal, rather than investing time and energy bartering in social and political activism.
