Workers tell Wells Fargo horror stories

Water Cooler
#1

http://money.cnn.com/2016/09/09/investing/wells-fargo-phony-accounts-culture/index.htmlWorkers tell Wells Fargo horror stories

Wells Fargo (WFC)has been accused by federal regulators of illegal activity on a stunning level.Authorities say employees at the bank secretly created millions of unauthorized bank and credit card accounts between 2011 and July 2015, allowing the bank to make more money in fees and meet internal sales targets.

Wells Fargo agreed to pay penalties of $185 million and fired 5,300 employees over the last few years related to this illegal activity. The news is rocking the industry and rippling across Wells Fargo’s millions of customers nationwide.

Former employees tell CNNMoney that they felt incredible demands from managers to meet sales quotas. The same managers turned a blind eye when ethical and even legal lines were crossed.

“I had managers in my face yelling at me,” Sabrina Bertrand, who worked as a licensed personal banker for Wells Fargo in Houston in 2013, told CNNMoney. “They wanted you to open up dual checking accounts for people that couldn’t even manage their original checking account.”

Currently a middle school teacher, Bertrand said she believes the sales targets were set by managers who were higher up: “The sales pressure from management was unbearable.”

The pressure cooker environment is also described in a lawsuit filed by Los Angeles against Wells Fargo in May 2015. The lawsuit says that Wells Fargo’s district managers discussed daily sales for each branch and employee “four times a day, at 11 am, 1 pm, 3 pm and 5 pm.”

It all stems from Wells Fargo’s internal goal of selling at least eight financial products per customer. It’s what Wells Fargo calls the “Gr-eight initiative.” Currently, Wells Fargo boasts an average of about six financial products per customer.

In pursuit of this goal, Wells Fargo employees engaged in all kinds of sordid practices. One of them was internally called “pinning,” where the bank issued ATM cards and assigned PIN numbers without customer authorization.

The bankers would impersonate their customers and “input false generic email addresses such as 1234@wellsfargo.com, noname@wellsfargo.com, or none@wellsfargo.com to ensure the transaction is completed,” the lawsuit said. The customer, meanwhile, remained completely unaware of the unauthorized activity.

#2

I worked at Wells in a non-sales capacity around 2010 and witnessed a lot of unreasonable department wide requests on about a weekly basis that basically came down to “you need to manage a quantifiably higher workload in less time with higher accuracy and less staff while getting paid the same”. At first, people were able to meet some of the objectives, but they kept moving the bar unreasonably higher while trying to achieve essentially contradictory goals but after awhile it just became a sort of joke. Was not impressed.

#3

that kind of greed definitely comes from up top. I hope all the fired employees included those unethical managers

#4

I worked at a different large bank between undergrad and grad school. It was no different. It’s the same at every bank.

#5

In this case, I think it qualifies as your greatest weakness.

#6

so far only the low level employees have been fired. the CEO should go at minimum

#7

“Eight financial products per customer.”

I can’t even name eight potential consumer products. Checking account, some kind of savings/MM, HELOC, mortgage, personal line of credit, and a credit card. That’s it. Most people only need two of those.

#8

Not disagreeing that this is shady, but I thought this was just normal SOP for a bank. When I was a Personal Banker at Chase, we were told to do underhanded, slimy tactics to get people to buy our stuff, too.

We operated on a “points” system. Everything you sold had some point value associated with it. EG:

  • Checking - 5 points
  • Savings - 5 points
  • Brokerage - 10 points
  • Online Banking - 30 points (because once people signed up for online banking, you could rest assured they would stay with the bank for a while)
  • Credit card - 25 points (even though we told them “it’s just a line of credit for o/d protection for your checking”, which should be illegal, if it’s not)
  • Mortgage - 1 point per $X
  • Home equity loan/LOC - 1 point per $X

At the end of every month, they tallied your points and the more you got, the more money you made. And we were told that no customer should ever leave the bank without being sold some of our shtty bank products.

#9

Your right Greeny. Like I said, I worked at a different large bank. I wasn’t working in a retail capacity but it was exactly the same there and it’s exactly the same at all other big retail banks.

#10

They sound like a total disaster.

#11

I heard about this, and would say it’s “unbelievable”, except I worked for one of these banks 15yrs ago, and this was exactly type of unethical behavior we had back then too (which led to the subprime collapse).

Seriously, Well Fargo needs to be shut down. The penalties simply aren’t working, they need to be much more severe , prison time not fired. And prison time for everyone at the top. Why? Because they either knew, or didn’t know. And neither is acceptable. If prison were the known outcome, this would not have happened. It happened because finance people calculate risk/reward, and the risks were acceptable for the reward (same as in subprime).

Not sure why society can’t figure out basic problems, it’s not complicated. Increase punishment until reward no longer seems appealing. And for massive crimes against society like this, death penalty is appropriate.

#12

firing squad or electric chair?

#13

Well that escalated quickly.

#14

I was opening a business account at a major bank. The cute orangutan kept asking me for information that was not required by law. She claimed it was and said her computer system would not allow the application to continue without said information. I told her to make up the answers in that case. I don’t know if she did or was full shit, but I got the account opened in under ten minutes from hello to goodbye. She said that was the fastest she had ever opened a business account. Ridiculous. I came in to open a checking account, not to be peddled product for an hour. Should have taken five minutes.

#15

Public hanging, of course. yes

#16

Based off greenie’s list, a few weeks ago it’s no wonder the rep was happy when I told her I wanted to apply for a credit card. Normally I’d have done it online but for this specific one I had to do it in branch.

Greenie, do they get any kind of direct commission for approved applications?

#17

^Yes. Just like above, a credit card may translate into 25 points.

And at the end of the month, you get paid based on the number of points you have.

0-500 points = .50 per point

500-1000 = .75 per point

1000-2000 = 1.00 per point

2000-5000 = 1.50 per point

Note - I’m just making these numbers up. I can’t recall the exact figures. But this is how the system works. And if you’re good at shilling crappy products to unsuspecting marks, you can make good money as a personal banker. I never made any money, because I didn’t believe that everybody who wanted to open a savings account needed a credit card and a home equity LOC.

#18

What is the meaning here?

#19

for a mortgage or LOC would it be 1 point per $1k?

#20

chequing, savings, cc, LOC, HELOC, mortgage, auto loan, investment loan, personal loan, brokerage, home insurance, auto insurance. you could have multiple of any of these really.

i’m sure life and critical illness coverage on any of these balances would count as one product each as well.

i just don’t know how Well’s average is over 6. that means there’s leagues of clients who have 10+ to offset those with 1 or 2.