[scottshepard]

I don't know how the author can draw this conclusion. He seems to say that employees engaging in shady practices is the inevitable conclusion of requiring a certain amount of accounts to be opened, and then blames the employees for doing it instead of those who wrote the policy.

The article quotes:

"Wells Fargo has strict quotas regulating the number of daily "solutions" that its bankers must reach; these "solutions" include the opening of all new banking and credit card accounts. Managers constantly hound, berate, demean and threaten employees to meet these unreachable quotas. Managers often tell employees to do whatever it takes to reach their quotas. Employees who do not reach their quotas are often required to work hours beyond their typical work schedule without being compensated for that extra work time, and/or are threatened with termination.

"The quotas imposed by Wells Fargo on its employees are often not attainable because there simply are not enough customers who enter a branch on a daily basis for employees to meet their quotas through traditional means."

This reads to me like damning culpability. Then he says, "But obviously no one in senior management wanted this." Well of course they don't, now that they've been caught! But it was a pretty good scheme at the time raking in millions of dollars.

[yummyfajitas]

The purpose of cross-selling is to make money, and that's why salespeople are incentivized to do it. The total amount of extra fees that were charged due to this is $2.4M (i.e. negligible to WF), or $1.14/fake account, or $450/dishonest employee.

If an underperforming employee earned $450 in pay that they did not deserve, WF lost money on this. As matt levine explains:

If your customers have a checking account, and a savings account, and a credit card and online banking, all in one place, then they'll probably use each of those products more...when they want a...mortgage...or investment advice -- they're more likely to turn to the bank where they keep the rest of their financial life...No one feels extra loyalty because they have a banking product that they don't use or know about.

In website terms, this is roughly equivalent to the head of marketing buying fake traffic so he can tell his boss that he did a good job with SEO and ask for a raise.

[marketforlemmas]

> WF lost money on this

This ignores the fact that Wells Fargo is a publicly traded company and has an incentive to make their numbers look good for their shareholders.

... And to be clear, your assertion is that thousands of employees across different branches all independently decided to commit fraud and risk their jobs all for an additional 450 per pay check? That is your alternative explanation?

[yummyfajitas]

On the contrary, I think they committed fraud to keep their jobs. The $450 is a break-even number; if not getting fired resulted in the employees getting an extra $450 in pay, then WF lost money.

[brazzledazzle]

I could be missing something here but whether or not Wells Fargo was losing money on each account opening in the short term or even overall is orthogonal to the issue. It might call into question the wisdom of how they structure bonuses but that's not relevant to the real victims which are the customers and bond holders.