Wells Fargo CEO More Confident in Bank’s Compliance Controls

Wells Fargo’s CEO reportedly has more confidence in his bank’s efforts to remedy its compliance issues.

Charlie Scharf’s comments, as reported Wednesday (Dec. 11) by Reuters, follow the banking giant’s years-long fake account scandal.

“For every one of our consent orders that we have, for every one of our regulatory deliverables, we have extremely detailed plans in place that the regulators have reviewed,” he told the Goldman Sachs Financial Services Conference. “We track our progress at the operating committee every single week.”

As Reuters noted, Wells Fargo is in the final stages of working to pass regulatory tests so it can in 2025 remove a $1.95 trillion asset cap as a result of the scandal.

The asset cap, considered one of the harshest punishments American regulators can hand down, was put in place in 2018 after Wells Fargo failed to deal with governance and risk-management problems following years of consumer abuses.

The limit hinders Wells Fargo’s ability to accept more deposits and boost its trading business, two potential growth areas for the bank, the CEO said earlier this year.

“We’ve actually taken balance sheet over the years away from our trading businesses, predominantly in terms of what they’re able to finance,” Scharf said at the Goldman conference. “We’ve started to give some of that back to them, and so we’ll continue to build that part of the business, which will benefit them.”

In September, Wells Fargo signed a formal agreement with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) to rectify deficiencies in the bank’s anti-money laundering (AML) and financial crimes risk management practices.

“We have been working to address a substantial portion of what’s required in the formal agreement, and we are committed to completing the work with the same sense of urgency as our other regulatory commitments,” the bank said in a statement at the time.

Meanwhile, the Reuters report also noted that Scharf on Wednesday expressed confidence that the incoming Trump administration would take measures to strengthen the U.S. economy.

“They’re very, very focused on ensuring that a broad group of Americans, both individuals and companies are successful,” he said.

His comments were echoed Tuesday by the head of another big bank, Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon, who projected an uptick in dealmaking next year, in part due to a more favorable regulatory environment under Trump.