Thread regarding Wells Fargo & Co. layoffs

If divisions are sold off, it doesn’t mean you will have a job elsewhere.

I’ve worked at many other banks and I know how this goes down outside of the WF bubble. The company keeps most staff for about 18 months, after they fully integrate the book of business into their existing infrastructure. After that, it’s bye-bye. They retain about 20% or less of legacy staff post-acquisition long-term. People are living in fantasyland if they think the grass is greener with a break up.

And, for the individuals thinking something could be spun off into a smaller stand alone business - think again. It’s too expensive. That’s why regional banks have merged again and again. It’s cost prohibitive to compete without the scalability of enterprise operations in today’s marketplace. It’s even happening outside of the banking industry, in fact Kroger is now acquiring Albertsons in order to compete against Walmart. Neither company could survive without that merger long-term. That’s the reality, size matters in corporate America today.

Another post about breaking up the bank. I think OP should break up with WF. It’s for the best. It’s WF, not you, OP.

@rtk+1oy9F47J

I think breaking up the bank is the only remaining choice - the lesser of evils.

But what would you recommend?

There shouldn’t be any employees here who think they are benefiting or will benefit under Charlie’s leadership, unless you were personally hired by him.

He can’t get rid of you fast enough under any of his strategies to slash costs, create efficiencies, spans & layers, mandatory stack ranking, closing locations, limiting locations to hubs, toxic culture to force attrition, and sending your job overseas. If you are listing your job duties and cross- training someone else: your time is limited no mater what they are telling you. Even if you are a new hire - they are hiring some employees until such strategies play out and then they are gone. There are people who have no idea their name is on a list right now to be let go before the end of the year.

I don’t know who Charlie is serving, other than his pocketbook (maybe trying to serve regulators?) but it is not employees.

Breaking things up to fix problems sounds a lot like how in the 90s every merger was going to "create synergy". Cool talking point, but I don't see how it would work. If your retail bank is screwing up, it would still be screwing up. If your investment bank is screwing up, it'd still be screwing up. On the consumer side of things you'd have the same number of issues, you'd just have more than one company to blame. That's not improvement. One could argue that a simpler org is easier to lead, but these clueless hacks couldn't run any fragment of the company either. We've replaced people that knew how to do things right with people that failed at JPM but are friends with execs purely here to cash in.

@hwm+1oy9F47J

It wouldn’t be quite that dramatic. Separate it’s banking activities from it’s non-banking activities. Break off the Wall Street trading and securities dealing from regular banking. Then split the size of the regular banking business in to two separate banks.

How would it benefit employees? It’s better than being shut down due to repeat corruption and mismanagement, with all 200,000+ employees losing their jobs.
Employees in the non banking business won’t lose their jobs due to mismanagement in the banking company. Maybe you won’t lose your job before the end of 2023 so that your CEO can spend $30,000,000,000 on a company stock buyback.

How does it benefit customers? Less customers would be subject to repeat exploitation, erroneous fees and fraud if Wells Fargo served half as many customers.

How does it benefit shareholders? Take a look at the stock. It’s been a losing proposition for investors both in terms of stock price as well as dividends. Shareholders are paying the price for our executives’ repeat failures.

How does it benefit the US Banking system? It’s one less bank which is Too Big ToFail and Too Big To Regulate.

Charlie himself has said his progress in repairing the bank is slow because it is too complex.

FYI - it is not my suggestion. It has been recommended by several Banking Regulatory bodies because Wells Fargo has not been able to bring the bank in to compliance in 7 years.

How would the bank's LOBs being broken up to sink or swim on their own improve the employment experience?

Or the customer experience? Instead of one bank, customers would have one entity for checking and savings, another entity for credit card, another for a loan, etc. You really think people would like that?

I think it makes frustrated employees feel good for a few seconds to boldly suggest an extreme-sounding solution, but I don't see how "breaking up the bank" helps anyone at all.

What am I missing?

@muk+1oy9F47J

I see your point, but Wells Fargo just keeps effing up in every way imaginable. They continue to deny accountability with every lawsuit and penalty. We’ve had 4 CEO’s in 7 years, and instability in the upper ranks and the Board. We consistently rank low on customer satisfaction.

Having said that - break up the other repeat offenders too. The Glass-Steagall Act should have never been repealed.

@muk+1 is correct. WF is easy picking for the regulators and has been the target of outsized regulatory attention probably for the last 5 years. The problem now is that morale has gone to absolute trash over the past 2 years and there is a lack of interest in the long term success of the organization. The JPM overhaul and WFIP pivot are having unintended consequences and leadership has not adequately considered the importance of culture and organizational knowledge.

Back to the root of the problem however, the regulators use WF like their own personal piggy bank and don’t really have any incentive for the company being run well in my opinion. They not evaluating outstanding risk and customer harm in an honest way. Wish they would prove me wrong.

What people fail to realize is that all of the Top 5 basically work in the same way. Wells is the only one right now that gets headlines and scrutiny. The other top 4 are just sitting back and eating popcorn. BAC just got hit with a fine for fake accounts and doing exactly what Wells did, but where is the attention?

Ok, if you say so. Let’s do it today