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by gmunu 3563 days ago
Matt Levine gives a great rundown of this https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-09-09/wells-far... ; you're exactly right, this wasn't Wells Fargo cheating customers. It was Wells Fargo putting some pressure on their employees who turned around and gamed the system in a way that earned the bank almost no money and mostly didn't cost their customers anything. Yes, some of the customers got some fees charged to them, but they were mostly small and most of the customers with accounts opened didn't lose anything.

That this should cause the CEO, who was several layers up the org chart from the person who came up with a bad retail bank employee performance metric, to go to jail is madness.
1 comments
panic 3563 days ago
The CEO was the one pushing the metric. This wasn't just a localized problem.
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ChristianGeek 3563 days ago
He also stated that he never considered firing the head of the unit responsible for the problem. I mean, come on.
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tommymachine 3562 days ago
The previous Wells CEO gave a talk at stanford GSB in 2009 in which he explained the company's core strategy in consumer financial services: distributing decentralized products and services through cross-selling. [1]

Since cross-selling has been core to the Wells Fargo business model for many years, and proven an effective growth mechanism over that time, it wouldn't make much sense to just go round firing people over pursuing that mechanism responsibly. What does make sense is adjusting course sternly when that pursuit starts to look irresponsible, and it appears the current leadership is doing that.

If Elizabeth Warren had the brains to understand the financial services industry, she wouldn't have time to fling baseless legal allegations at dinosaur incumbents like Wells Fargo. She would be too busy disrupting them.

With an institution as old and large as Wells Fargo, the problem isn't that their strategy is bad. "How can it be bad when it's been good all these years?" It's actually much deeper than that: their strategy is yesterday's strategy, and that can be a big problem when you have the kind of organizational inertia Wells does.

1. https://youtu.be/XTh4ELp2VDc?t=2678

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