Atop Wells Fargo & Co., Chief Executive Officer Charlie Scharf has achieved something that eluded the bank for at least 15 years: zero outstanding public consent orders.
The Federal Reserve said Thursday that it terminated the last one, which was issued in 2018 alongside a restriction that prohibited Wells Fargo from growing beyond its asset size at the end of 2017. The Fed lifted that cap last June.
Wells Fargo demonstrated that its remediation work to improve governance and risk management, which spanned nearly a decade, had been effective, the Fed said in a statement. The bank completed two third-party reviews to prove its case, according to the statement.
Wells Fargo, once entangled with regulatory punishments on a wide range of issues concerning consumer protections and risk controls, has resolved more than a dozen consent orders since Scharf took the helm as the CEO in 2019. About half of them were removed since the beginning of last year.
The bank was already grappling with a few consent orders in 2016 when it was engulfed in a series of scandals beginning with the creation of millions of fake accounts. That resulted in more sanctions and, by the time Scharf took over, the San Francisco-based bank had 14 outstanding.
In the years since, Scharf cleared each of those, plus a couple more imposed in the early years of his tenure.
(Credit: Diego M. Radzinschi/ALM)
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