Thread regarding Wells Fargo & Co. layoffs

Here is another article summarized (by bard) here:

• Wells Fargo is paying a $35 million fine and nearly $40 million in restitution to settle Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) allegations that its investment advice arm overcharged customers for years.
• The company overcharged nearly 11,000 accounts about $26.8 million in advisory fees from 2002 to 2022.

The overcharging occurred because Wells Fargo did not have adequate controls in place to ensure that discounts on advisory fees were properly applied to customer accounts.

• The problem began at Wachovia, which Wells Fargo acquired in 2008.
• Wells Fargo learned about the overcharging in 2018 and has since reimbursed affected customers.

The SEC's enforcement action highlights the importance of having adequate controls in place to prevent billing errors, especially when firms are involved in mergers and acquisitions.

Here are some additional details from the article:

The SEC order found that Wells Fargo advisors were manually entering agreed-upon discounts into a new customer account setup tool, which did not automatically populate those one-off discounts.
The discounts were then transferred to a legacy Wachovia billing system that is still in use today.
Wells Fargo did not have policies or procedures in place that required advisors to review and confirm the accuracy of charges.
The company did have a quality control process in place from 2009 to 2014, but it was only for accounts with more than $250,000 when they were opened.
The quality control process spread to smaller accounts starting in 2014, but the company did not do a historical lookback to examine past discrepancies.
The fine is one of a number of penalties that Wells Fargo has paid in recent years for consumer-abuse scandals.

In December 2021, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau fined Wells Fargo $1.7 billion for shortcomings in auto loan, mortgage, and deposit products.

In May 2022, the company agreed to pay $1 billion to shareholders to settle claims that its past leaders were overly optimistic on how quickly it would solve its outstanding issues with regulators.

CEO Charlie Scharf, who joined the company in late 2019, has said that overhauling the company's risk and control framework remains Wells Fargo's "top priority."

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/wells-fargo-sec-settlement-advisory-220859780.html

@agc I completely agree and they really are penny pinchers. :)

Regarding the BOA/fraud acct scandal comments, while true we’re in the penalty box/asset cap, BOA just got busted for opening fraudulent accounts just like Wells. I mean, how did they not mitigate this seeing our news hit back in 2016 or so? You’re telling me they saw us hit with Billion dollar fines and they didn’t bother to clean house? Seems news worthy to me, but no. Crickets!

Lemme guess, in-person work? Alrighty, myjobisdone.jpg

Isn't some over educated m_r_n supposed to say about now that as long as we have DEI all is well, at Wells?

CS wants to do away with the mortgage business to go after High Net Worth investment customers, but those HNW / UHNW customers are among the people who care the very most about getting the absolute best return on investment.

HNW people aren't like TV/movie characters who throw money away without caring, they tend to be cutthroat, shrewd penny-pinchers that wouldn't dream of overpaying in fees or trusting a bank that has a history of overcharging its clients.

So CS is abandoning regular Americans who are often too d-mb to know WF is even a problematic bank so CS can chase the HNW customers who are too smart to do business with WF. Our stock price tells the story.

It just seems like our leadership knows how to bend over pretty well. Where is compliance on all of this -- missing in action. Well I bet the stock will hit 35 before it hits 45.

….AND no one upstairs loses their jobs. These overcharges continued through Dec 2022., under Charlie’s reign. Good honest employees being let go for no cause, but the highly- paid snakes continue to $u-k Wells Fargo dry.

because WF is still in the penalty box

Re: comment below. Bank of America is not under a Federal Asset Cap. Wells Fargo brought on all the heat themselves with the Fraudulent Accounts. And our current CEO and Board appear incapable of making the changes necessary to get us out from under the Asset Cap, focusing instead on Stock Buybacks, credit cards, layoffs, offshoring and cost-cutting.

I just want to point out Bank of America has paid 3 times the amount of fines recently as Wells Fargo, but for some reason, they never make the news.