This week Senator Elizabeth Warren rightfully grilled CEO of Wells Fargo, John Stumpf. She exposed that Stumpf personally made $200 million in stock appreciation based in no small part on Wells Fargo’s countinuingly touting its push to 8 accounts per customer because “eight rhymes with great”. Stumpf could not answer if Wells had any research showing its customers needed 8 accounts, which of course, they don’t.
The pressure to cross-sell was so high that over 5,200 employees were fired for opening fraudulent accounts. You would think after they have to fire 4,000 employees that the company might have seen a problem. Of course, they saw the problem. Carrie Tolstedt, the head of the community banking division that included the fired employees was recently allowed to retire at age 56 with a $125 million going away present. What do you think the odds are that the severance agreement has some pretty mighty anti-whistle-blowing provisions?
People who did try to blow the whistle faced retaliation accourding to this CNN Money article.
https://money.cnn.com/2016/09/21/investing/wells-fargo-fired-workers-retaliation-fake-accounts/
It wasn’t just whistleblowers who who tried to object to the fake accounts. Duke Tran was fired from Wells Fargo after he tried to expose the practice of obscuring problems with documents used to support Wells Fargo’s mortrgage foreclosures.
https://underdoglawyer.com/policy/
All of this is off the topic that I want to raise, and that is – what’s it like to work at Wells Fargo? I googled “I was fired by Wells Fargo, and here are a few tidbits that I discovered.