The banking giant named Steve Ellis, the head of the wholesale services division, to helm the new group. Wells Fargo said in its Thursday announcement that Ellis reports in turn to Hope Hardison, who will take over the chief administrative office from Pat Callahan when the latter retires at the end of next month. The newly formed Innovation Group is under the umbrella of the chief administrative office group, which spans human resources, corporate communications, enterprise marketing and government and community relations.
The Innovation Group will initially center on areas including payment strategies, research and development and analytics, among others. Several members of Ellis’ wholesale teams will make the transition to the Innovation Group.
Wells Fargo noted in the release that it had also launched the Wells Fargo Startup Accelerator, which through its third funding round has been seeding financial industry startups operating in arenas ranging from omnichannel to biometrics to beacons.
“Creating the Innovation Group puts an even larger focus on creating the products, services and technologies that will allow us to stay competitive and allow our customers to do their banking when, where and how they would like,” said John Stumpf, Wells Fargo’s chairman and chief executive officer, said in the release announcing the Innovation Group formation.
According to the release, Ellis also led the initiative roughly 15 years ago that resulted in Wells Fargo creating the first single sign-on point of access to a variety of financial services for businesses. That initiative in turn spawned the company’s Commercial Electronic Office (CEO) portal and CEO Mobile eight years ago. The two portals offer banking services to customers across commercial, corporate and institutional arenas in 190 countries.
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