CFPB Terminates 2022 Consent Order Against Wells Fargo

Wells Fargo has announced the termination of its 2022 consent order with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) related to automobile lending, consumer deposit accounts and mortgage lending.

“This is the seventh consent order closed by Wells Fargo’s regulators since 2019,” the bank said in a Tuesday (Jan. 28) press release.

The CFPB page about the enforcement action shows its status as expired/terminated/dismissed.

The consent order announced in December 2022 included a $3.7 billion fine and required Wells Fargo to end the practice of surprise overdraft fees or fees for deposit accounts “when the consumer had available funds at the time of a purchase or other debit transaction, but then subsequently had a negative balance once the transaction settled.”

The order settled a case in which the CFPB alleged that the bank committed a series of illegal acts, including illegally assessed fees and interest charges on loans, wrongful car repossessions and unlawful overdraft fees.

Wells Fargo said at the time in a press release that the agreement resolved several ongoing issues.

“As we have said before, we and our regulators have identified a series of unacceptable practices that we have been working systematically to change and provide customer remediation where warranted,” Wells Fargo CEO Charlie Scharf said in the release. “This far-reaching agreement is an important milestone in our work to transform the operating practices at Wells Fargo and to put these issues behind us.”

The news of the termination of the CFPB’s consent order came about two weeks after Scharf said during an earning call that Wells Fargo will continue to invest in building the right risk and control infrastructure after seeing the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) terminate a consent order in early 2024 — which at the time was the sixth consent order terminated by Wells Fargo’s regulators since Scharf joined the bank.

“Early last year, the OCC terminated a consent order it issued in 2016 regarding sales practices,” Scharf said during the Jan. 15 earnings call. “The closure of this order was an important milestone and is a confirmation that we operate much differently today.”