Wells Fargo

Wells Fargo & Company
Type	Public company
Traded as	NYSE: WFC
Industry	Banking, financial services
Founded	18 March 1852 in New York City
Founder	Henry Wells, William G. Fargo
Headquarters	San Francisco, California, United States
Key people	Charles W. Scharf (Chairman and Chief Executive Officer)
Services	Retail banking, commercial banking, wealth management, investment banking, mortgage lending
Employees	Approximately 215,000

Wells Fargo & Company is an American multinational financial services company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It is one of the four largest banks in the United States alongside JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup, and among the largest in the world by assets. It operates thousands of branches across the United States, is one of the country's largest mortgage lenders and among the largest providers of small business credit.

The company was founded on 18 March 1852 by Henry Wells and William G. Fargo to provide banking and express delivery services to California during the gold rush. Its stagecoaches, and the six-horse team that still appears in its advertising and on its logo, gave it a place in the popular history of the American West that few financial institutions possess and that the company has cultivated for a century and a half.

That inheritance sits awkwardly against the bank's modern record. Beginning in 2016 Wells Fargo became the subject of the most damaging sequence of scandals affecting any large American bank in the period after the financial crisis, starting with the discovery that employees had opened millions of accounts without customers' knowledge in order to meet sales quotas, and extending to improper charges on car insurance and mortgage products, discriminatory lending and hiring practices, and failures of internal control across several divisions. In February 2018 the Federal Reserve imposed an unprecedented cap on the bank's total assets, prohibiting it from growing until its governance was repaired.

The cap was lifted in June 2025, after seven years, in what was widely treated as the formal end of the episode. Charles W. Scharf, chief executive since October 2019 and chairman since October 2025, was credited with the remediation.

History

The express company and the gold rush, 1852 to 1918

Henry Wells and William Fargo had already founded American Express in 1850 when they proposed extending its business to California, where the discovery of gold had produced a sudden demand for the movement of money, mail and valuables across a continent with no railway and no banking system. American Express's directors declined, and the two men established Wells, Fargo & Company independently on 18 March 1852.

The company opened in San Francisco in July 1852 and offered two related services: banking, including the purchase of gold dust and the issue of bank drafts, and express delivery of freight and valuables. It built a network of offices across the mining districts and, from 1858, participated in overland mail and stagecoach operations, eventually absorbing the Pioneer Stage Line and taking over the western operations of the Butterfield Overland Mail. In 1866 it consolidated most western stagecoach operations under its own name, and for a period the Wells Fargo agent was the principal representative of the national economy in a great many isolated settlements.

The completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 ended the stagecoach era but not the express business, which moved to rail. The stagecoach nevertheless became the company's permanent symbol, and the robberies attending it, notably those attributed to the poet-bandit Black Bart, gave it a place in American folklore.

In 1905 the banking and express businesses were separated. The bank merged with the Nevada National Bank to form the Wells Fargo Nevada National Bank. During the First World War the federal government nationalised the express industry into the American Railway Express Company, ending the express business entirely.

The California bank, 1918 to 1998

For most of the twentieth century Wells Fargo was a California bank rather than a national one, constrained like all American banks by laws prohibiting branching across state lines. It merged with the American Trust Company in 1960 to form the Wells Fargo Bank American Trust Company, adopting the name Wells Fargo Bank in 1962, and grew through the postwar expansion of California into one of the largest banks in the western United States.

In 1986 it acquired Crocker National Bank from Midland Bank in a transaction that roughly doubled its California branch network and that was regarded as unusually well executed, and in 1988 it bought the retail operations of Barclays Bank of California. Under Carl Reichardt and later Paul Hazen the bank developed a reputation for cost control and for early adoption of technology, launching one of the first internet banking services in 1995.

An attempt to acquire First Interstate Bancorp in 1996 succeeded as a hostile bid but the integration was poor, with widespread account errors and customer defections, and it is remembered as a cautionary example of merger execution.

Norwest, national expansion and the crisis, 1998 to 2012

In 1998 Wells Fargo merged with Norwest Corporation of Minneapolis. Although Wells Fargo was the better-known name and was retained, Norwest was the acquirer in substance: its management took charge, its chief executive Richard Kovacevich led the combined company, and its operating philosophy governed what followed.

That philosophy was cross-selling. Kovacevich's conviction was that a bank should be understood as a shop, that products were merchandise, and that the object was to sell each household as many products as possible. The internal target, expressed in the slogan "Going for Gr-Eight", was eight products per household, chosen, Kovacevich said, because it rhymed with great. Cross-selling ratios were reported to investors as a headline measure of performance and were tracked daily at branch level.

The strategy produced a decade of admired results. Wells Fargo's cross-sell ratio was higher than any comparable bank's, analysts treated it as evidence of superior customer relationships, and business schools taught it as a model. Its consequences were not understood until much later.

The bank emerged from the financial crisis of 2008 in better condition than its peers, having avoided most subprime securitisation, and in October 2008 it acquired Wachovia for about US$15.1 billion, outbidding Citigroup in a contested transaction that briefly reached litigation. Wachovia, which had itself been fatally weakened by its 2006 purchase of the mortgage lender Golden West Financial, brought a large eastern branch network and made Wells Fargo a genuinely national bank for the first time. The combination created one of the four largest American banks and, for a period around 2015, the most valuable bank in the world by market capitalisation.

The account fraud scandal, 2016 to 2018

On 8 September 2016 the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the City and County of Los Angeles announced a settlement of about US$185 million over the opening of unauthorised accounts. Employees under pressure to meet daily sales quotas had opened deposit and credit card accounts in customers' names without their knowledge, transferred funds between them to make them appear active, and in some cases created fictitious email addresses to enrol customers in online banking. The number of potentially unauthorised accounts, initially estimated at about 1.5 million deposit accounts and 565,000 credit cards, was later revised upward to roughly 3.5 million.

Approximately 5,300 employees had been dismissed over several years for such conduct, a fact the bank presented as evidence of enforcement and which critics read as evidence that management knew the practice was widespread and treated it as an employee problem rather than a design problem.

The consequences escalated quickly. John Stumpf, the chief executive, appeared before Congress in September 2016 and was subjected to a widely broadcast questioning by Senator Elizabeth Warren; he resigned in October. Carrie Tolstedt, who had run the community banking division where the conduct occurred, forfeited a large part of her compensation, was later barred from the banking industry and in 2023 pleaded guilty to obstructing a bank examination, receiving a sentence of home confinement and a fine. Clawbacks from Stumpf and Tolstedt exceeded US$100 million. An independent board investigation published in April 2017 attributed the conduct to unrealistic sales goals, a decentralised structure in which the community banking division resisted oversight, and a leadership that dismissed evidence of the problem for years.

Further failures emerged in the same period. The bank had charged several hundred thousand car loan customers for collateral protection insurance they did not need, in some cases causing vehicles to be repossessed. It had charged mortgage customers fees for rate lock extensions caused by its own delays. Separate matters concerned foreign exchange pricing, fiduciary practices in wealth management and add-on products.

On 2 February 2018 the Federal Reserve took an action without precedent for an institution of this size: it prohibited Wells Fargo from growing beyond its total asset size at the end of 2017, approximately US$1.95 trillion, until it had demonstrated that its governance and risk management were adequate. The order also required the replacement of several directors. Because a bank's profit depends on the size of its balance sheet, the cap functioned as a continuing financial penalty of substantial size, estimated by analysts in the billions of dollars of forgone earnings each year. Timothy Sloan, who had succeeded Stumpf, resigned in March 2019.

The cross-selling failure examined

The account fraud is worth setting out as a case study, because its mechanism is general rather than particular to banking.

The target

The instruction given to branch employees was to increase the number of products held by each household, with eight as the stated aspiration. Products counted included current accounts, savings accounts, debit cards, credit cards, online banking enrolment, overdraft protection, insurance and investment accounts.

Two features made the target unmeetable. The first is arithmetic: most households do not want eight banking products and will not acquire them however skilfully they are approached. The second is that the target was applied uniformly, to branches in wealthy suburbs and in poor neighbourhoods alike, without regard to whether the customer base could plausibly support it.

The enforcement

Progress was measured daily. Branch managers reported figures multiple times a day in some regions; employees below target were subjected to escalating performance management and, in many accounts given afterwards, to threats of dismissal. Bonuses and continued employment both depended on the number.

The predictable result

Faced with a requirement they could not meet honestly, a substantial number of employees met it dishonestly. They opened accounts customers had not requested, moved small sums between them to keep them from closing automatically, enrolled customers in online banking using email addresses the employees created, and issued credit cards without applications. Customers discovered the accounts through unexpected fees, unexplained credit inquiries and, in some cases, damage to their credit scores.

Approximately 5,300 employees were dismissed for this conduct over several years. The dismissals were treated internally as enforcement of standards. They were in fact the clearest available evidence that the standards could not be met, and a system producing five thousand instances of the same violation is not experiencing an integrity problem among individuals.

Why it was not corrected sooner

The board's 2017 investigation identified several reasons. The community banking division was highly decentralised and its leadership resisted central risk oversight, which was tolerated because the division's reported results were excellent. Complaints reached the ethics line and were routed back to the same division. The reported cross-sell ratio was a headline investor metric, so questioning its validity meant questioning the company's principal claim to superiority over its competitors. And senior management characterised the problem, repeatedly and in public, as the misconduct of a small proportion of employees.

The general lesson

The episode is now taught alongside other instances of the same failure, in which a quantity chosen to represent a desirable outcome becomes the outcome itself and is then produced directly. The pattern requires three elements: a target that cannot be met by the intended means, a measurement that can be satisfied by other means, and consequences severe enough that people will use them. Wells Fargo supplied all three for more than a decade, and the fact that the conduct was discovered through journalism and municipal litigation rather than through the bank's own controls is the part that most concerned regulators.

Leadership

Carl Reichardt (1983 to 1994) established the bank's reputation for cost discipline and executed the Crocker acquisition.
Paul Hazen (1995 to 1998) led the First Interstate acquisition and the Norwest merger.
Richard Kovacevich (1998 to 2007, chairman to 2009) brought the cross-selling strategy from Norwest and made it the centre of the bank's identity and of its investor story.
John Stumpf (2007 to 2016) led the Wachovia acquisition and the period in which the bank became the most valuable in the world, and resigned in October 2016 after the account fraud disclosures, forfeiting about US$69 million in compensation.
Timothy Sloan (2016 to 2019), a long-serving insider, was appointed to restore confidence and resigned after regulators and legislators made clear that an internal successor was unlikely to satisfy them.
Charles W. Scharf (2019 to present), the first outsider to lead the bank, directed the remediation that led to the asset cap being lifted in June 2025, and became chairman in October 2025.

Terminology

Cross-selling is the sale of additional products to an existing customer, and the cross-sell ratio is the average number of products per household, the measure at the centre of the scandal.

Consent order is a formal agreement with a regulator requiring specified remediation, enforceable and closed only when the regulator is satisfied.

Asset cap is a prohibition on a bank growing beyond a stated balance sheet size, imposed on Wells Fargo in February 2018 and lifted in June 2025.

Clawback is the recovery of compensation already awarded, applied to Stumpf and Tolstedt in amounts exceeding US$100 million.

Force-placed insurance is coverage a lender buys on a borrower's behalf when the borrower's own policy lapses, charged to the borrower and typically far more expensive than ordinary cover.

Collateral protection insurance is the equivalent for vehicle loans, the product improperly charged to several hundred thousand car loan customers.

Robo-signing is the mass execution of foreclosure documents without the review the documents attest to, the practice underlying the 2012 national mortgage settlement.

The Wachovia acquisition

The purchase of Wachovia in 2008 was the transaction that made Wells Fargo a national bank, and the circumstances of it were among the more dramatic episodes of the financial crisis.

Wachovia, based in Charlotte, North Carolina, was the fourth-largest American bank by assets and had been fatally weakened by its acquisition in 2006 of Golden West Financial, a California lender whose speciality was the option adjustable-rate mortgage, a product allowing borrowers to pay less than the accruing interest so that the balance owed increased over time. When house prices fell, the portfolio became catastrophic.

By late September 2008, in the days after the failure of Lehman Brothers and the seizure of Washington Mutual, Wachovia was losing deposits rapidly. On 29 September the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation announced that Citigroup would acquire its banking operations in a government-assisted transaction, with the agency sharing losses above a threshold.

Four days later Wells Fargo made a competing offer for the whole company, at a higher price and without government assistance, which Wachovia's board accepted. Citigroup sued, arguing that it held an exclusivity agreement. The dispute was conducted over a weekend in the New York courts and was resolved when a change in tax rules, issued by the Treasury during the same period, made the acquisition substantially more attractive by permitting the acquirer to use Wachovia's losses against its own income. Citigroup withdrew and later received a settlement.

The transaction closed on 31 December 2008 at a value of about US$15.1 billion. It doubled Wells Fargo's branch network, gave it a presence across the eastern United States and the south-east where it had none, and brought the Wachovia Securities brokerage that became Wells Fargo Advisors. It also brought the Golden West mortgage portfolio, which generated losses for years, and the money laundering failures that produced the 2010 deferred prosecution agreement.

The acquisition is generally judged a success in strategic terms and is the reason Wells Fargo is one of the four national banks rather than a large regional one. It also illustrates a pattern of the crisis: the institutions that survived it in reasonable condition were permitted, and in some cases encouraged, to absorb those that did not, with the result that an event widely understood as a crisis of excessive concentration ended by concentrating the industry considerably further.

Key figures

Founded 18 March 1852; among the oldest continuously operating financial institutions in the United States.
Assets capped at approximately US$1.95 trillion from February 2018 until June 2025.
Employees approximately 215,000, reduced from more than 260,000 before the remediation programme.
Branches several thousand across the United States, reduced substantially from the peak.
Account fraud approximately 3.5 million potentially unauthorised accounts identified; about 5,300 employees dismissed over several years.
Penalties include US$185 million in September 2016, about US$3 billion in 2020, and about US$3.7 billion in December 2022.
Clawbacks from John Stumpf and Carrie Tolstedt exceeded US$100 million.
Consent orders more than a dozen terminated between 2019 and 2025.

Remediation under Scharf, 2019 to 2026

Charles W. Scharf became chief executive in October 2019, the first outsider to lead the bank in its modern history, having previously run Visa and Bank of New York Mellon and worked earlier under Jamie Dimon. His approach was to treat the problem as one of control rather than of culture alone: consent orders were worked through methodically, the risk and control functions were rebuilt and substantially enlarged, sales incentives tied to product counts were eliminated, several businesses judged to be outside the bank's core were sold, including the asset management arm, the corporate trust business and the student loan portfolio, and headcount was reduced considerably.

The bank continued to incur penalties during the period. In December 2022 the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau ordered payments of about US$3.7 billion, comprising some US$2 billion to customers and a US$1.7 billion civil penalty, over mishandling of car loans, mortgages and deposit accounts including wrongful repossessions and foreclosures. Fines followed over record-keeping failures involving staff use of unapproved messaging applications, a matter affecting the whole industry.

Progress was nonetheless measurable in the closing of consent orders, of which more than a dozen were terminated between 2019 and 2025. On 3 June 2025 the Federal Reserve lifted the asset cap after more than seven years. Analysts attributed the decision principally to Scharf's remediation programme, and the bank's shares rose sharply on the announcement, since the removal of the cap restored its ability to grow deposits, lending and trading balances for the first time since 2018.

In October 2025 Scharf was appointed chairman of the board in addition to chief executive, a recombination of the roles that had been separated as part of the post-scandal governance reforms and that drew some criticism on that basis.

In December 2023 employees at a branch in Albuquerque, New Mexico, voted to join the Communications Workers of America's Wells Fargo Workers United, making Wells Fargo the first major American bank with a unionised branch. Further branches followed, and the organising campaign has been treated as a test of whether retail banking, which has never been meaningfully unionised in the United States, will follow the pattern of other service industries.

In June 2025 the bank hired a senior banker from Citigroup to lead an activism defence practice, advising corporate clients facing pressure from activist investors, part of a broader effort to rebuild the investment banking business that the asset cap had constrained.

In July 2025 Mao Chenyue, a managing director of the bank, was subjected to an exit ban in China in connection with a criminal investigation, as confirmed by a spokesperson for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Wells Fargo suspended all employee travel to China in response. The episode drew wide attention in international banking, since exit bans applied to executives of foreign financial institutions raise direct questions about the safety of staff conducting ordinary business in the country.

Operations

Wells Fargo reports four business segments.

Consumer Banking and Lending comprises branches, deposit accounts, credit cards, car loans and mortgages. The bank has historically been among the largest mortgage originators and servicers in the United States, though it reduced that business substantially in 2023, withdrawing from correspondent lending and narrowing its focus to existing customers and to lending in minority communities, a retreat from a market it had led for decades.

Commercial Banking serves middle-market companies with lending, treasury management and asset-based finance, and is among the largest such franchises in the country.

Corporate and Investment Banking provides lending, capital markets, advisory and trading services to large corporate and institutional clients. It is smaller than the equivalent operations at JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup, and expanding it has been a stated priority since the asset cap was lifted.

Wealth and Investment Management includes Wells Fargo Advisors, one of the largest networks of financial advisers in the United States, and private banking services.

The bank is among the largest lenders to small businesses and among the largest issuers of debit and credit cards. Its branch network, once the largest in the country, has been reduced substantially as transactions have moved to digital channels, following a pattern common to every large retail bank.

Context: American banking and its regulators

Wells Fargo's history is legible only against the structure of American banking, which differs from that of every other developed country.

Fragmentation and its slow end

Until the 1990s the United States had thousands of banks and almost no national ones, because federal and state law prohibited banks from operating branches across state lines and in many states from operating more than one branch at all. The restrictions dated from a nineteenth-century political preference for local banking over concentrated financial power, reinforced by the Bank Holding Company Act of 1956 and the McFadden Act of 1927.

The consequence was a system of extraordinary fragility: a bank confined to a single state was exposed entirely to that state's economy, which is why the agricultural crises of the 1980s and the Texas oil collapse of the same decade destroyed hundreds of institutions. It is also why Wells Fargo remained a California bank for seventy years.

The Riegle-Neal Act of 1994 permitted interstate branching, and consolidation followed immediately and at scale. The Wells Fargo and Norwest merger of 1998, the creation of Bank of America from NationsBank, and the assembly of JPMorgan Chase from Chemical, Chase, J.P. Morgan and Bank One all belong to this period. The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 removed the remaining separation between commercial and investment banking established by the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, permitting the combination of deposit-taking, securities underwriting and insurance in one institution.

By 2008 the United States had, for the first time, a small number of very large banks, and the crisis of that year concentrated the industry further as the strongest acquired the failing. Wells Fargo's purchase of Wachovia, JPMorgan's of Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual, and Bank of America's of Merrill Lynch and Countrywide all occurred within months.

Who regulates a large American bank

The supervisory structure is correspondingly complicated. The Federal Reserve supervises bank holding companies and conducts the annual stress tests that determine how much capital a bank must hold and how much it may return to shareholders; it was the Federal Reserve that imposed the 2018 asset cap. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency charters and supervises national banks. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation insures deposits and resolves failed institutions. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, created by the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 after the financial crisis, enforces consumer protection law and brought the largest of the actions against Wells Fargo. State attorneys general, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Justice have their own jurisdictions.

A bank the size of Wells Fargo is therefore answerable to at least six federal bodies with overlapping remits, which is why a single episode of misconduct generates parallel actions and settlements over a period of years, and why the number of separate penalties in the record overstates the number of underlying problems.

The asset cap as a regulatory instrument

The February 2018 order was unusual enough to merit separate attention. Regulators ordinarily respond to misconduct with fines, with consent orders requiring remediation, or in extreme cases with a prohibition on individuals. Capping a bank's balance sheet is different in kind: it does not punish past conduct but forecloses future growth, and because a bank's earnings are a function of its assets, it imposes a continuing cost that compounds.

The reasoning was that fines had not worked. Wells Fargo had paid penalties repeatedly without the underlying control failures being corrected, and a penalty that can be absorbed as a cost of business does not change behaviour. A growth prohibition, by contrast, cannot be absorbed: it makes the resolution of the control failures the precondition of doing anything else.

By most assessments the instrument worked. The bank spent seven years and a very large sum rebuilding its risk and control functions, closed more than a dozen consent orders, and had the cap removed in June 2025. The cost in forgone growth was estimated by analysts in the tens of billions of dollars over the period, considerably more than any fine that would plausibly have been imposed. Whether the approach is extended to other institutions is among the open questions in American bank supervision.

Lawsuits, fines and controversies

The list of regulatory actions against Wells Fargo over the past two decades is long enough that it has become a subject of study in itself, and the pattern is more instructive than any single item.

Discriminatory lending

In 2012 the bank agreed to pay more than US$175 million to settle Department of Justice allegations that it had charged higher fees and interest rates to African American and Hispanic borrowers than to comparably qualified white borrowers, and had steered minority borrowers into subprime mortgages when they qualified for prime loans. The city of Baltimore and others brought related actions.

The issue recurred. Reporting in 2022 found that the bank approved a substantially lower proportion of refinancing applications from Black homeowners than from white applicants during the refinancing boom of 2020, prompting congressional inquiry and litigation. The bank disputed the analysis while acknowledging disparities in outcomes.

Mortgage servicing and foreclosure

Wells Fargo was among the five banks in the 2012 national mortgage settlement, contributing about US$5.35 billion over robo-signing and improper foreclosure practices. In 2018 it disclosed that a software error in its underwriting calculation had caused several hundred customers to be wrongly denied loan modifications, of whom roughly four hundred lost their homes. A racketeering action alleged overcharging for mortgage appraisals, and a further case concerned inflated premiums on force-placed insurance applied to borrowers' properties.

Anti-money laundering and Wachovia

In 2010 Wachovia, by then owned by Wells Fargo, reached a deferred prosecution agreement over the failure to monitor about US$378 billion in transfers from Mexican currency exchange houses, funds that included proceeds of narcotics trafficking. The penalty of about US$160 million was widely criticised as small relative to the sums involved, and the case became a standard citation in arguments about whether large banks are prosecuted seriously.

Overdraft and account practices

The bank was found in 2010 to have reordered debit transactions from largest to smallest in order to maximise the number of overdraft fees generated, and was ordered to repay about US$203 million in a California class action. Aggressive freezing and closure of customer accounts, particularly those of customers flagged by automated fraud systems, has generated continuing complaint, with customers reporting funds inaccessible for extended periods without explanation.

Employment practices

The bank faced allegations of conducting sham job interviews with minority candidates for positions that had already been filled, in order to satisfy an internal diversity guideline, reported in 2022 and the subject of a federal inquiry. Separate actions have alleged discrimination against women in pay and promotion in the wealth management division.

Securities and disclosure matters

The Securities and Exchange Commission has taken action over inadequate risk disclosures, over failure to supervise registered representatives, over steering customers towards more expensive retirement account arrangements, and over an insider trading matter. A 2020 settlement of about US$3 billion with the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission resolved criminal and civil investigations into the account fraud, including charges that the bank had misled investors about the cross-selling figures it reported.

Other matters

Additional controversies have concerned financing of the Dakota Access Pipeline, which prompted several municipalities to withdraw deposits; investment in private prison operators, from which the bank later divested; lending relationships with firearms manufacturers and with the National Rifle Association; violations of New York credit card law; alteration of documents relating to business customers, reported in 2018; the 1981 embezzlement of about US$21.3 million by an operations officer at a Beverly Hills branch, at the time the largest such theft in American history; and repeated shareholder objections to executive compensation.

Why the pattern matters

The individual items vary greatly in seriousness and several are common across large banks. What distinguished Wells Fargo was the number, the duration and the common root. The board's own 2017 investigation identified it plainly: a decentralised structure in which a large division resisted central oversight, sales targets set without regard to whether they could be met honestly, a compensation system that rewarded product counts, and a senior management that interpreted evidence of misconduct as a matter of employee integrity rather than of system design. Once that combination existed, the specific form the failures took was close to incidental.

Environmental record and charity

Wells Fargo has committed to net zero financed emissions by 2050 and has set interim targets for the oil and gas and power generation sectors. It has been among the largest American lenders to renewable energy projects and has financed a substantial share of the country's utility-scale solar and wind capacity through tax equity investment.

It has also been among the larger lenders to fossil fuel producers, and its financing of the Dakota Access Pipeline prompted divestment campaigns and the withdrawal of municipal deposits by Seattle and other cities in 2017. Like other large American banks it withdrew from the Net-Zero Banking Alliance during the retreat from collective climate commitments in 2024 and 2025, while stating that its own targets remained.

The Wells Fargo Foundation is among the larger corporate foundations in the United States. In April 2022 it pledged US$210 million towards racial equity in home ownership, including US$60 million through the Wealth Opportunities Restored through Homeownership programme providing down payment assistance in a number of cities, and US$150 million towards reducing mortgage costs for existing customers. The bank also operates a large employee volunteering programme and has been a substantial supporter of small business development and of affordable housing finance.

In popular culture

The stagecoach and the six-horse team are among the most recognisable corporate symbols in the United States and appear throughout the iconography of the American West, in western films, in museums maintained by the company, and in the Wells Fargo History Museums operated in several cities. The company's participation in the 1852 gold rush, the overland mail and the stagecoach robberies of the period places it in a national mythology that very few businesses occupy, and the persistence of that imagery in its advertising through the account fraud scandal drew comment, since the gap between the symbol and the conduct was unusually wide.

Assessment

Wells Fargo's history contains two distinct achievements and one prolonged failure, and the relationship between them is the interesting part.

The achievements are real. For most of the twentieth century it was among the best-run banks in the western United States, and its acquisition of Crocker in 1986 was a model of integration. It navigated the 2008 crisis better than any of its large peers, having largely avoided the securitised subprime lending that destroyed several of them, and its purchase of Wachovia turned a regional institution into one of the four national banks. For a period around 2015 it was the most valuable bank in the world, and its reputation was for conservative, customer-focused retail banking of a kind the industry was held to have lost.

The failure grew directly out of what had been praised. Cross-selling was a genuine insight about retail banking and it was implemented as a numerical target enforced daily on employees who had no way to meet it honestly. The measure that analysts treated as evidence of exceptional customer relationships was in substantial part a record of accounts customers had not asked for. The board's own investigation is unusually candid about how this happened, and its account, of targets set without regard to feasibility, of a division allowed to resist oversight because it was performing, and of years of dismissing evidence as an employee integrity problem, describes a failure mode that is not specific to banking.

The remediation appears to have worked, at least by the measure regulators applied. Seven years under an asset cap is an extraordinary sanction, and lifting it in June 2025 was a formal statement that the Federal Reserve considered the governance fixed. The bank's task now is commercial rather than remedial: it has a large deposit base, a strong commercial banking franchise, a mortgage business it has deliberately shrunk, and an investment bank considerably smaller than those of its three national competitors. Whether it can grow into the space the cap denied it for seven years, against competitors who used those years to extend their lead, is the question of its next decade.

Timeline

1852 Founded on 18 March by Henry Wells and William G. Fargo; opens in San Francisco in July.
1866 Consolidates most western stagecoach operations.
1869 Transcontinental railroad completed, ending the stagecoach era.
1905 Banking and express businesses separated.
1918 Express business nationalised into the American Railway Express Company.
1960 Merges with American Trust Company; adopts the name Wells Fargo Bank in 1962.
1981 Embezzlement of about US$21.3 million at a Beverly Hills branch.
1986 Acquires Crocker National Bank.
1996 Hostile acquisition of First Interstate Bancorp; integration widely judged poor.
1998 Merges with Norwest Corporation; Richard Kovacevich leads the combined company and cross-selling becomes the central strategy.
2008 Acquires Wachovia for about US$15.1 billion after a contested bidding process with Citigroup.
2010 Wachovia deferred prosecution agreement over money laundering monitoring failures; overdraft reordering ruling.
2012 US$175 million discriminatory lending settlement; participation in the US$25 billion national mortgage settlement.
2016 Account fraud settlement announced on 8 September; John Stumpf resigns in October.
2017 Independent board report published in April; car insurance and mortgage fee failures disclosed.
2018 Federal Reserve imposes an asset cap on 2 February.
2019 Timothy Sloan resigns in March; Charles W. Scharf appointed chief executive in October.
2020 US$3 billion settlement with the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission.
2022 US$3.7 billion Consumer Financial Protection Bureau order in December; US$210 million racial equity in home ownership pledge in April.
2023 Correspondent mortgage lending exited; Carrie Tolstedt pleads guilty; first unionised branch certified in Albuquerque in December.
2025 Asset cap lifted in June after more than seven years; managing director subjected to an exit ban in China in July; Scharf appointed chairman in October.