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February 22, 2017 at 06:55 AM
Wells Fargo & Co. fired the head of its consumer credit-card business and three other senior managers as the bank’s board examines how abusive sales practices spread through branches before spiraling into a national scandal last year.
Shelley Freeman, the former Los Angeles regional president who went on to run consumer-credit solutions, was terminated, along with Arizona lead regional president Pam Conboy, former community bank risk chief Claudia Russ Anderson and Matthew Raphaelson, 55, who led community bank strategy and initiatives. The bank announced the moves in a statement Tuesday, saying the four won’t get bonuses for 2016 and will forfeit unvested equity awards and outstanding options.
Wells Fargo’s leaders have been working since September to assuage public furor after authorities fined the bank $185 million for possibly opening more than 2 million retail bank accounts without customers’ approval. The board and management are each conducting reviews into how the practice proliferated, vowing to hold managers accountable as needed after the company fired 5,300 mostly low-level employees for their roles in recent years.
Freeman, 58, declined to comment. The other three managers didn’t immediately respond to messages seeking comment.
Cross-Selling
Freeman and Conboy were among managers described by Bloomberg in a November story that profiled community banking supervisors who won promotions as the bank’s top brass focused on cross-selling, the practice of persuading individual customers to sign up for more Wells Fargo products.
After overseeing operations in Los Angeles, Freeman went to run Florida, where she sent e-mails to branch workers urging them to sell and describing the kind of lifestyle they might hope to achieve, former employees said. She once mentioned her Super Bowl tickets and buying an $800 pair of sunglasses, one ex-manager recalled. Conboy, 57, who climbed the ranks in California, was sometimes sent to other regions to teach sales strategies, managers said.
