Did you catch the latest in the Wells Fargo ongoing saga? They settled with the New York State Attorney General to the tune of 65 million dollars. This stems from a lawsuit from the state, alleging false practices. Now, 65 million dollars is a lot of money, but it’s a drop in the bucket to the more than three billion dollars that Wells Fargo has paid out for settlements and back payments and fines stemming from the blowup that occurred in 2016. When employees were creating false accounts and turns out were conducting unfair cross-selling practices.
Now, adding to the money that they’ve had to shell there, they have been through one CEO and possible another as this video airs. They have been through several executives and more importantly, they’ve lost a slew of confidence with the going public about their ability to actually look-out for their needs.
In this particular crisis PR situation, there is really only one thing for them to do – clean house. With the entire executive team has been tarnished from this actions and this goes beyond any one particular individual. Now the current CEO is actually the President before he assumed the duties and it looks like he might be on his way out. Right now, they have a perception, and probably deservedly so, of being a culture of looking out for themselves first, and their customers second.
Whenever an organization loses that kind of trust from that large of a customer base, you’ve got to bring somebody in from the outside. Somebody who will clean house. Somebody who will start from a clean slate. Somebody who can come in and say definitively, “I wasn’t involved with any of the nefarious actions, and this isn’t going to happen on my watch.” I don’t care how skilled of a banker, how competent of a person might be internal, do not hire from within.
Wells Fargo may be in fact too big to fail, but they aren’t big enough to lose ground with the likes of Bank of America, and other national institutions who are clamoring for a little bit more of the pie. And if you’re in a position where you’re in a similar circumstance, where the bulk of your customers, quite frankly just don’t believe you, you’re going to have to take your executive team and show them the door.
There’s truth in the fact if you take care of customers, the customers are going to take care of you. But you have to demonstrate that, not just now, every time a customer engages with you, but you have to demonstrate that to people who aren’t even your customers. Who never will be your customers, who don’t care about that. Because, they’re going to tell those customers, “Hey, you should bank in my institution. Let me tell you about my financial service people. Let me tell you how they’re taking care of me.” You’ve got to quiet them down and the only way to do that right now, to get rid of anybody and everybody who was in that executive wing at the time this went down.
