On August 31, 2017, Wells Fargo (WFC) announced it completed an expanded third-party review of retail bank accounts which increased the number of potentially unauthorized consumer and small business accounts to 3.5 million from 2.1 million. In addition, an additional 528,000 accounts had potentially unauthorized online bill pay enrollments.
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Nearly a year ago on September 20, 2016, WFC CEO, John Stumpf, testified in front of the Senate Banking Committee regarding the “cross-selling” scandal which also cost 5,300 employees their jobs. WFC never provided the “cross-sell” metric in a table format in public filings, and as a result the data cannot be derived from legacy financial research platforms.
During the hearing, Senator Elizabeth Warren highlighted:
- The word “cross-sell” appeared in every transcript from 2012 through 2014.
- Stumpf first mentioned “cross-sell” in 2010 AR, highlighting he picked the target 8. He picked the target 8 because it rhymed with great.
- The correlation between the WFC stock price and the number of times “cross-sell” was mentioned.
- All 12 printed transcripts were submitted as evidence.
Using Sentieo’s Document Search for “cross-sell,” we found the following:
WFC not only used “cross-sell” on every transcript between 2012-2014, but also:
- Cross-sell appears in 120 WFC documents, more than any other major bank during this time frame
- WFC executives mentioned “cross-sell” 10x more than JP Morgan and 7x the average of the other top banks.
- Stumpf highlighted in 2010 that WFC picked 8 as the target, but if they had found something to rhyme with 10, WFC would’ve just picked 10.
- WFC increased the use of “cross-sell” between 2012 and 2014 relative to the past.
Using Sentieo’s Plotter data visualization tool, we plotted WFC’s use of “cross-sell” vs. WFC Stock Price between September 2007 and September 2017 :
Dear Senator Warren, and anyone else, please feel free to contact us for additional information.
Article by Sentieo
