Regulators have said the bank cannot grow until it fixes practices that led to series of sales scandals. Employees report limited progress.
Wells Fargo has spent years publicly apologizing for deceiving customers with fake bank accounts, unwarranted fees and unwanted products. Its top executives say that because they have eliminated the aggressive sales targets that spurred bad behavior, the bank’s culture has changed.
Many employees say that is news to them.
There is no evidence that employees are secretly opening accounts in customers’ names or tricking them into buying unnecessary auto insurance, as some did in the past. The bank has altered how it pays workers and added safeguards to catch bad behavior.
But Wells Fargo workers say they remain under heavy pressure to squeeze extra money out of customers. Some have witnessed colleagues bending or breaking internal rules to meet ambitious performance goals, according to interviews with 17 current and former employees and internal documents reviewed by The New York Times.
In Des Moines, where the bank — the nation’s fourth biggest — has a large debt-collecting operation, workers in December were expected to handle at least 30 calls an hour and recoup $34,000 in unpaid credit-card and other debts for the month. In January, the targets rose to 33 calls an hour and $40,000, goals that many employees there failed to attain, according to internal records.
“For us front-line workers, there’s an overwhelming sense of frustration,” said Mark Willie, who works in the Des Moines office and is part of a group, the Committee for Better Banks, trying to unionize Wells Fargo employees. “There is a general fear of retaliation for speaking out.”
Two mortgage-processing employees in Minneapolis said managers pressured their team to send documents that they knew contained incorrect information to borrowers to meet internal deadlines.
In a survey of more than 27,000 employees in the bank’s information-technology department late last year, top concerns included their ability to raise grievances with managers and whether “Wells Fargo conducts its business activities with honesty and integrity.” Workers recently flooded the bank’s internal blog with hundreds of angry comments about Wells Fargo’s sales incentives, pay and ethics and leaders’ “doublespeak,” according to screenshots of the blog reviewed by The Times.
Wells Fargo executives said in interviews that the bank’s culture had improved and that fewer bank employees had direct financial incentives to sell products to customers.
“Our entire system of how we pay, coach and develop team members is designed to focus on customer experience and customer outcomes,” said Mary Mack, Wells Fargo’s head of consumer banking. “Things have changed a lot.”
Ms. Mack said none of the debt-collecting employees in the Des Moines group had lost their jobs last year for not meeting the goals. She declined to comment on the Minneapolis mortgage processors, but said the bank investigates employees’ allegations.
Wells Fargo was regarded for years as one of America’s best banks. Then, in 2016, its pattern of wrongdoing became public. The bank admitted that employees had opened as many as 3.5 million phantom accounts in customers’ names to meet stratospheric sales goals. It also admitted forcing customers to buy unneeded auto insurance and charging improper mortgage fees.
The scandal has been costly for Wells Fargo. Its chief executive was pushed out. The bank has paid more than $1.5 billion in penalties to federal and state authorities, and $620 million to resolve lawsuits from customers and shareholders. Most painful, the Federal Reserve punished the bank in February 2018 by prohibiting it from expanding until it cleaned up its culture and internal checks and balances — a restriction that remains in force.
