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Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf Steps Down

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Re: Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf Steps Down

#141

Post by phil21 »

honkhonkpants wrote: post #4

Honestly I still don't understand why this organization continues to exist. Banks are chartered by the government for the purpose of safeguarding deposits. This bank was engaged in fraud on a huge scale. Their charter should be terminated.

Fraud against themselves mostly.

I think you'll find all the major retail banks had policies very similar to Wells Fargo. Wells Fargo was certainly the tall poppy, but I have friends who have worked there and at other similar banks in a retail banker role - they didn't think anything abnormal of the sales pressure at WF, just noted it was a bit more intense than what they were used to and actually generally found WF to be better to work for than the other majors.

I would even go so far as to argue the vast majority of consumer service sales operates under such unsustainable models as well, which encourage if not outright imply fraud. Ask any retail cellular employee and they'll be able to tell you stories that sound identical to Wells Fargo. Cramming is the default state of the game, since "corporate" will always continue to ratchet up sales quotas until they are unachievable for most moral people.

I think I'm mostly surprised anyone cares, it's been going on for a decade plus and this sort of stuff is an open secret among retail sales in many industries. Why is it only now being reported? Why is only Wells Fargo being singled out?

I don't oppose your solution. I'm just curious who Wells pissed off or didn't pay off, that the other banks apparently did.

Re: Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf Steps Down

#143

Post by tedmiston »

carsongross wrote: post #83
vkou wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Get fired or quit before it vests. (Conditional on your contract.) Edit: If you are a C-level executive, your contract may stipulate that you get unvested stock, even if you're fired. It's possible that John Strumpf chose not to exercise any such clause, but I strongly doubt it. The man is a psychopath.

Right, but that seems like it's being extremely deceptive: when you quit or get fired you stop vesting. It isn't clawed back in any meaningful way. When you or I leave a startup, we don't talk about our unvested options getting "clawed back".

> when you quit or get fired you stop vesting

Generally true, but sometimes there is vesting acceleration upon termination [1]. (I have no idea how much it's used in the banking world; just that it exists.)

[1]: http://venturehacks.com/articles/acceleration-termination

Re: Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf Steps Down

#144

Post by nicobn »

honkhonkpants wrote: post #4

Honestly I still don't understand why this organization continues to exist. Banks are chartered by the government for the purpose of safeguarding deposits. This bank was engaged in fraud on a huge scale. Their charter should be terminated.

So, your solution is to liquidate a bank that controls 2 T$, employs 265,000 persons and has over 200 B$ in shareholder value? Don't get me wrong, this fraud affected a lot of people but ultimately liquidating the whole thing will have a negative effect multiple orders of magnitude greater.

Re: Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf Steps Down

#145

Post by agjacobson »

bratsche wrote: post #91
nickbauman wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember WF was one of the banks that failed the stress tests after the 2008 financial crisis. I've been trying to get away from WF for a while now, but no other bank can fill its shoes in terms of online services and ubiquity. Yet it has a culture of predatory capitalism where "your loss is our gain".

I never wanted to do business with WF in the first place, but I bought a house a few years ago and the mortgage company sold my mortgage to WF. Being forced to be someone's customer against your will sucks.

Why should you care who services your mortgage? The only thing on your mind should be proper treatment of any payments you make exceeding your standard payment. You need to be sure that extra amounts are credited to principal.

Re: Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf Steps Down

#146

Post by eric_h »

tmm wrote: post #80
eric_h wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they cookie you on the direct link hit, so going back and doing the web link doesn't work without incognito (IME).

I get the paywall, even in incognito across all browsers. They must also be tracking by IP.

Fascinating. I work at a large WeWork (hundreds of people, ~9 floors of a 12 story building in manhattan). I wonder if I'm silently benefitting from WSJ subscribers who work out of there causing our ips to be whitelisted for uncookied, google-referred views.

Do you do most of your browsing from home?

Re: Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf Steps Down

#147

Post by honkhonkpants »

phil21 wrote: post #141
honkhonkpants wrote: post #4

Honestly I still don't understand why this organization continues to exist. Banks are chartered by the government for the purpose of safeguarding deposits. This bank was engaged in fraud on a huge scale. Their charter should be terminated.

Fraud against themselves mostly. I think you'll find all the major retail banks had policies very similar to Wells Fargo. Wells Fargo was certainly the tall poppy, but I have friends who have worked there and at other similar banks in a retail banker role - they didn't think anything abnormal of the sales pressure at WF, just noted it was a bit more intense than what they were used to and actually generally found WF…

How did you conclude that Wells Fargo itself is the victim? Nobody has even tried to add up all the fees they charged their account holders on these phantom accounts.

Re: Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf Steps Down

#148

Post by rbolkey »

forgetsusername wrote: post #133
Smerity wrote: post #14

I highly recommend listening to a recent episode[1] of Planet Money. This was by no means an accident. As a short summary of one employee's plight: Ashley, working for them and making only $35k per year in San Francisco, was continually harassed to sign people up for accounts they didn't want. An old man comes in, pensioner, $200 in overdraft fees due to being duped into excess accounts. She dips into her own savings…

> Wells Fargo put her onto a permanent blacklist that others in the industry pay attention to - she can't get a job anywhere else. I just listened to this episode last night, by chance. She speculates that she is on a blacklist, because she's having trouble finding work. But there's a more charitable (to the other banks) explanaton: she was a very low level employee who, true or not, just got fired for a massive frau…

It sounded like they verified her speculation:

SMITH: Ashley tried to get another job in banking, but she found that she never made it very far past the initial interviews. She suspected that Wells Fargo had put some sort of black mark on her record somewhere. And it turns out that is exactly the case. Wells Fargo wasn't joking around when they said they would make it hard for her to find work again.

ARNOLD: No. Wells Fargo wrote her up on what's called a U5 document. It's like a report card for bankers basically. We tracked it down, and we asked Ashley to read what it said.

ASHLEY: Failure to perform job duties.

SMITH: Any bank - any bank that Ashley applies to will see this line, failed to do job duties.

ARNOLD: The form does not mention that those job duties were the sales goals that everyone we spoke to said were unrealistic and that are at the center of a series of ongoing investigations at the state and federal level.

SMITH: It just says failed to do job duties. It was the first time Ashley had seen it in print.

ASHLEY: It's like having a black cloud that's kind of looming behind you. And I'm always trying to get in front of the cloud, out of the cloud, into the sunshine, but it's always there.

http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?story...

Re: Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf Steps Down

#149

Post by [deleted] »

rbolkey wrote: post #148
forgetsusername wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wells Fargo put her onto a permanent blacklist that others in the industry pay attention to - she can't get a job anywhere else. I just listened to this episode last night, by chance. She speculates that she is on a blacklist, because she's having trouble finding work. But there's a more charitable (to the other banks) explanaton: she was a very low level employee who, true or not, just got fired for a massive frau…

It sounded like they verified her speculation: SMITH: Ashley tried to get another job in banking, but she found that she never made it very far past the initial interviews. She suspected that Wells Fargo had put some sort of black mark on her record somewhere. And it turns out that is exactly the case. Wells Fargo wasn't joking around when they said they would make it hard for her to find work again. ARNOLD: No. Well…

[deleted]

Re: Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf Steps Down

#150

Post by sliverstorm »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #127
yelnatz wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to the episode it was the U5 form[0]. Banks use the form as one of the employment references. [0] http://www.finra.org/industry/terminate-individuals-registra...

http://i.imgur.com/KM2fzuS.png Every time she tries to get a job anywhere, that form will be checked by her potential employer?

I mean, it makes sense, there's a certain amount of trust involved in finance so you'd like to know if a prospective employee had been fired in the past on suspicion of fraud/salami slicing/whatever
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