Tim Sloan

Timothy J. Sloan
Nationality	American
Education	Master of Business Administration (1984), University of Michigan, Ross School of Business
Occupation	Banker, investment executive
Company	Wells Fargo & Company; Fortress Investment Group
Title	Former president and chief executive officer, Wells Fargo & Company

Timothy J. Sloan is an American banker who served as president and chief executive officer of Wells Fargo & Company from October 2016 to March 2019, resigning after two and a half years of effort to contain the fallout from the bank's account fraud scandal drew sustained criticism from federal regulators and members of Congress. He joined Wells Fargo in 1987 and spent 31 years at the bank, rising through its wholesale and corporate finance operations to serve as chief administrative officer, chief financial officer, head of wholesale banking, and then president and chief operating officer before his appointment as chief executive.

Sloan became chief executive on 12 October 2016, immediately succeeding John Stumpf, who had resigned amid the scandal over millions of checking, savings and credit card accounts opened at the bank without customers' consent. As chief executive he presided over a Federal Reserve order capping the bank's asset growth, a $500 million penalty from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and a related $1 billion penalty from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and a series of further lapses in the bank's mortgage, auto lending and wealth management businesses.

On 28 March 2019, sixteen days after a contentious appearance before the House Financial Services Committee in which the committee chairwoman, Maxine Waters, told him the bank "has failed to clean up its act" and said regulators should consider removing him, Sloan told the company's board he would step down. He stepped down as chief executive, president and a director immediately, with his retirement from the company taking effect on 30 June 2019, and was succeeded on an interim basis by general counsel C. Allen Parker. Sloan later joined the investment firm Fortress Investment Group as a senior advisor in March 2020 and has since taken on a number of nonprofit board roles in Los Angeles, where he is based.

In December 2023, Sloan sued Wells Fargo in California state court, seeking more than $34 million in compensation and bonuses he said the bank had illegally withheld after his departure, including a $15 million bonus the bank canceled when he joined Fortress.

Early life and education

Sloan attended the University of Michigan, where he earned a Master of Business Administration from the university's Ross School of Business in 1984, before beginning his banking career. At a March 2019 congressional hearing, he testified that he began working in banking as a teller while putting himself through college. In the 2019 Wells Fargo proxy statement and in contemporaneous press coverage of his resignation, his age was given as 58, consistent with a birth year in the early 1960s, though no public record discloses his exact date of birth.

Career

Early career at Wells Fargo, 1987 to 2010

Sloan joined Wells Fargo & Company in 1987 and spent the next three decades in the bank's commercial, credit and real estate operations rather than in the retail and community banking division where the account fraud scandal later originated. Over that period he held leadership roles in the company's credit and real estate businesses and headed groups including Commercial Banking, Commercial Real Estate and Specialized Financial Services.

Chief administrative officer and chief financial officer, 2010 to 2014

Wells Fargo appointed Sloan chief administrative officer in 2010 and chief financial officer in 2011. Testifying before the House Financial Services Committee in March 2019, Sloan confirmed he served as chief financial officer from 2011 to 2014. During this period the bank's community banking division, where the unauthorized-account practices were occurring, did not report to him.

Head of wholesale banking and president and chief operating officer, 2014 to 2016

In 2014, Sloan was named head of Wells Fargo's wholesale banking business. In November 2015 he was promoted to president and chief operating officer, a move described by The Wall Street Journal at the time as making him "a likely successor" to then chief executive John Stumpf. As chief operating officer he oversaw the community banking division for approximately seven months, during which he told Congress he concluded that the division's head, Carrie Tolstedt, was "not the right person to continue" and the two parted ways.

Chief executive officer, October 2016 to June 2019

Wells Fargo's board elected Sloan president and chief executive effective 12 October 2016, immediately after Stumpf's resignation, and he became a member of the company's board of directors in 2016. The 2019 Wells Fargo proxy statement lists him as having no seats on other public company boards during his time as chief executive.

In his sworn opening testimony to the House Financial Services Committee in March 2019, Sloan said that on taking the role he "pledged to look back years to examine every business at Wells Fargo to ensure that no similar problems existed anywhere else in the company," and described a programme that reviewed more than 165 million accounts going back more than 15 years, contacted more than 40 million customers through 246 million individual communications, and provided what he called tens of millions of dollars in compensation to affected customers. He told the committee that the bank's enterprise risk, finance and human resources functions had been centralized under his leadership, that more than 3,000 new risk professionals had been hired, and that the board had been refreshed with seven new independent directors, including a new board chair, Elizabeth "Betsy" Duke, a former Federal Reserve governor whom he described as the first woman to chair a major American financial institution.

Resignation, March 2019

Sloan's tenure as chief executive ended amid continuing regulatory and political pressure. On 12 March 2019, he appeared before the House Financial Services Committee at a hearing titled "Holding Megabanks Accountable: An Examination of Wells Fargo's Pattern of Consumer Abuses," where he faced sustained, often hostile questioning from members of both parties over the bank's record of consumer abuses, its use of mandatory arbitration against affected auto loan customers, and executive compensation. Closing the hearing, Chairwoman Waters said the hearing "revealed that Wells Fargo has failed to clean up its act, that it is too-big-to-manage," and said she believed the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which was reportedly considering forcing out executives, "should take this important step, and the regulators should also consider it with you, Mr. Sloan."

On 28 March 2019, the day after the bank disclosed in a securities filing that Sloan's total compensation for 2018 had risen 4.9 percent to $18.4 million, he informed the board of his decision to step down, a sequence of events the Los Angeles Times described as having "appeared to seal Sloan's fate." The company announced that Sloan had stepped down as chief executive officer, president and a director effective that day, that he would retire from the company on 30 June 2019, and that the board had elected general counsel C. Allen Parker as interim chief executive and president. The company said Sloan would "not receive any special treatment or additional compensation arrangements in connection with his retirement" and would instead receive the normal retirement treatment available to eligible employees, including continued vesting of existing equity awards over three years subject to performance conditions. On a conference call with analysts the day of his departure, Sloan said: "There's just been too much focus on me and it's impacting our ability to move forward." Board chair Elizabeth Duke said Sloan had served the company "with pride and dedication" and had "worked tirelessly" since becoming chief executive, and said the board had concluded that "seeking someone from the outside is the most effective way to complete the transformation" at the bank. According to the Los Angeles Times, Sloan's retirement package was worth about $52 million based on a securities filing.

After Wells Fargo: Fortress Investment Group, 2020

In March 2020, Fortress Investment Group announced the appointment of Sloan as a senior advisor to the firm, based in its Los Angeles office, where he was to advise the firm's senior leadership and serve on its investment committees. Fortress principal and co-chief executive Pete Briger said in the announcement that "our funds and our investors will benefit from Tim's deep experience, his intellectual rigor and proven commercial instincts," and Sloan said he had "had a close relationship with Fortress for over two decades." The same month, the bank canceled a $15 million bonus it had previously awarded Sloan, a decision he later disputed in litigation.

Leadership and management style

Sloan described his approach to leading Wells Fargo after the account fraud scandal as centered on "accountability and transparency," telling Congress that "our guiding principle has been to err on the side of customers." He said the bank had eliminated the product sales goals that had contributed to the creation of unauthorized accounts and had replaced them with a performance evaluation system that "prioritizes serving customers and managing risk" rather than sales volume. He pointed to town hall meetings with employees as a channel for gauging morale, telling the committee that voluntary staff turnover had fallen to its lowest level in six years by the end of 2018.

When pressed by Representative Jennifer Wexton on whether he was the right person to change a culture he had been part of for three decades, Sloan replied that "having knowledge of the company allows me to make the difficult decisions to reorganize the company more quickly," and when asked whether the company's transformation reflected his own leadership or regulators' oversight, he said: "I have made all the decisions, so I take responsibility for those decisions and whether they work or they don't." Under questioning from Representative Al Green about accountability for the scandal, Sloan acknowledged that the executive who had run the community bank during the unauthorized-account period, Carrie Tolstedt, had reported to him for about seven months and that he had decided she was "not the right person to continue" in the role, while maintaining that no portion of his own salary, aside from a reduction tied to his 2016 equity award, had been clawed back.

Major deals and strategic decisions

As chief executive, Sloan oversaw a remediation effort that, according to his own testimony, reviewed more than 165 million Wells Fargo accounts going back more than 15 years and contacted more than 40 million customers through 246 million individual communications in connection with the retail sales practices matter. He told Congress the bank raised its minimum wage to $15 an hour at an annual cost of about $200 million, at a time when the bank's median annual salary was about $60,000. He said Wells Fargo had committed $185 billion to support African American and Hispanic homeownership and that its Neighborhood LIFT down-payment grant program had distributed about $449 million to roughly 20,000 low- to moderate-income homebuyers over six years.

Sloan also testified that, roughly two years before the March 2019 hearing, Wells Fargo decided to exit its lending relationships with the two largest private prison operators, GEO Group and CoreCivic, telling Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez that the bank had already ended one relationship and would not renew the credit agreement with the other as it matured.

Financial and market performance

Wells Fargo's shares rose about 8 percent during the period Sloan served as chief executive, a performance the Financial Times contrasted with gains of about 70 percent for Bank of America and about 30 percent for Citigroup over the same period, as rival large banks benefited from a strong American economy. A 2023 account of his subsequent lawsuit against the bank similarly put Wells Fargo's share appreciation at about 8.3 percent during his tenure. In February 2018 the Federal Reserve capped the bank's total assets at their level at the end of 2017, a restriction that remained in place through the balance of Sloan's time as chief executive.

Sloan's total compensation as reported in Wells Fargo's proxy statements was $13,014,714 for 2016, $17,564,014 for 2017, and $18,426,734 for 2018, the last of which included a base salary of $2.4 million unchanged since March 2016 and a stock award valued at $14,000,056. Questioned about his pay by Representative Al Green at the March 2019 hearing, Sloan confirmed that 86 percent of his 2017 compensation was paid in stock and that his pay that year was about 291 times the company's reported median employee salary of a little more than $60,000. He also told the committee that about $7.5 million of his compensation had been clawed back, in the form of a reduced 2016 equity award tied to the sales practices matter.

Board memberships and outside roles

While chief executive of Wells Fargo, Sloan held a board seat only at Wells Fargo itself; the company's 2019 proxy statement lists no other public company directorships for him. After leaving Wells Fargo, he joined Fortress Investment Group as a senior advisor in March 2020. According to the company's announcement of that appointment, Sloan is also a member of the Board of Trustees of the California Institute of Technology, where he chairs the board's investment committee, and a member of the Advisory Board of the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business.

Controversies

Sloan's tenure as chief executive was dominated by the fallout from Wells Fargo's account fraud scandal, in which bank employees, under a sales incentive program, opened accounts, credit cards and related products for customers without their knowledge or consent. At the March 2019 congressional hearing, Sloan confirmed under questioning from Representative Al Green that the number of potentially unauthorized accounts "may be as high as 3.5 million." Roughly 5,300 employees were terminated in connection with the matter, a figure cited by multiple members of Congress during the hearing and not disputed by Sloan.

In February 2018, the Federal Reserve announced an enforcement action restricting Wells Fargo's growth until the bank improved its governance and risk management, stating that the bank "pursued a business strategy that prioritized its overall growth without ensuring appropriate management of all key risks" and that it had failed to maintain "an effective firm-wide risk management framework." Then Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen said the bank's conduct could not be tolerated. The Federal Reserve's order required each sitting director to sign a consent cease-and-desist order and stated that letters had been sent to former chairman and chief executive John Stumpf and a former lead independent director, Stephen Sanger, informing them that their performance in those roles "did not meet the Federal Reserve's expectations"; the Federal Reserve's statement did not single out Sloan in the same terms.

In April 2018, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency assessed a $500 million civil penalty against Wells Fargo Bank and, acting jointly with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, found the bank had engaged in unsafe or unsound practices in the improper placement of collateral protection insurance on auto loans and in charging improper fees for mortgage interest rate lock extensions; the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau separately assessed a $1 billion penalty, crediting the amount collected by the OCC toward its own fine.

Sloan's March 2019 appearance before the House Financial Services Committee was described by the Financial Times as a hearing at which he "was repeatedly cut off as he tried to speak," and at which Chairwoman Waters told him "he doesn't get it." During the hearing, Representative Katie Porter asked Sloan why Wells Fargo's lawyers were arguing in federal litigation, in a case in which he was named personally as a defendant, that his own public assurances about restoring customer trust were "paradigmatic examples of non-actionable corporate puffery on which no reasonable investor could rely," a characterization Sloan said he could not explain. Representative Stephen Lynch told Sloan, "you robbed your customers," and other members, including Representative Ed Perlmutter and Representative Jennifer Wexton, pressed Sloan on specific instances of alleged misconduct in auto lending, mortgage servicing and the bank's overall corporate culture. Closing the hearing, Waters said she intended to reintroduce the Megabank Accountability and Consequences Act, legislation she had first introduced in 2017 aimed at holding large banks and their executives accountable for consumer protection violations.

Senator Elizabeth Warren, who had called for Sloan's removal since 2017, responded to his resignation by writing on Twitter: "About damn time. Tim Sloan should have been fired a long time ago. He enabled Wells Fargo's massive fake accounts scam, got rich off it, & then helped cover it up." She separately said he "shouldn't get a golden parachute" and should be investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Justice "for his role in all the Wells Fargo scams." A spokesman for the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, one of the bank's chief regulators, said at the time of Sloan's departure that the agency was "disappointed with [Wells Fargo's] performance under our consent orders and its inability to execute effective corporate governance and a successful risk management program."

In December 2023, Sloan sued Wells Fargo in California state court, alleging the bank had improperly withheld more than $34 million in deferred compensation, canceled stock awards and a bonus, and seeking unspecified damages including for emotional distress. His attorneys characterized his 2019 resignation as "an act of further loyalty to the bank" and argued that "other than politically charged, financially motivated and factually unsupported rhetoric from the bank's critics, there is no documented criticism of his performance," pointing to a 2017 internal board investigation that, according to the lawsuit, found he bore no responsibility for the scandal. A Wells Fargo spokesperson responded that "compensation decisions are based on performance" and that the bank stood "behind our decisions in this matter."

Personal life

Public reporting on Sloan's personal life is limited. He has said he began working as a bank teller to help pay for college before starting his career in banking. Since leaving Wells Fargo he has been based in the Los Angeles area, where Fortress Investment Group's announcement of his appointment placed his office.

Philanthropy

Sloan has served on the Board of Governors of the Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California, and on the Capital Campaign Committee of the Union Rescue Mission, a homeless services organization in Los Angeles. As chief executive of Wells Fargo, he told Congress the bank had committed $185 billion to support African American and Hispanic homeownership and had distributed about $449 million through its Neighborhood LIFT down-payment grant program to about 20,000 low- to moderate-income homebuyers over six years, corporate initiatives rather than personal gifts.

See also

• Wells Fargo
• John Stumpf
• C. Allen Parker
• Charles Scharf
• Fortress Investment Group

External links

• <ref>"Holding Megabanks Accountable: An Examination of Wells Fargo's Pattern of Consumer Abuses (full hearing transcript)".govinfo.gov.Retrieved 28 September 2026.</ref>
• <ref>"Wells Fargo & Company SEC filings".U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, EDGAR.Retrieved 28 September 2026.</ref>