Wells Fargo CEO expresses increased confidence in regulatory fixes

Wells Fargo CEO Charlie Scharf expressed more confidence on Wednesday in the bank's progress to fix compliance problems after its years-long fake accounts scandal, detailing its efforts to implement risk controls. 

"For every one of our consent orders that we have, for every one of our regulatory deliverables, we have extremely detailed plans in place that the regulators have reviewed," he told the Goldman Sachs Financial Services Conference. 

"We track our progress at the operating committee every single week," Scharf said. 

The bank is in the last stages of a process to pass regulatory tests to lift a $1.95 trillion asset cap next year after fixing problems from its fake-accounts scandal, Reuters reported exclusively last month. 

 

The asset cap, seen as one of the toughest punishments US regulators can put in place, was imposed on the bank in 2018 after it failed to fix governance and risk-management lapses after years of consumer abuses. 

The limit curtails Wells Fargo's ability to take in more deposits and expand its trading business, two potential growth areas for the bank, Scharf said earlier this year. 

"We've actually taken balance sheet over the years away from our trading businesses, predominantly in terms of what they're able to finance," he said at the conference. 

"We've started to give some of that back to them, and so we'll continue to build that part of the business, which will benefit them." 

Scharf also said steps taken translate to better management of operational risk and compliance in the company. 

He also talked about the US economy, saying the bank is seeing continued strength across consumers and businesses. 

Scharf expressed confidence the new administration of President-elect Donald Trump would take steps to bolster the US economy. 

"They're very, very focused on ensuring that a broad group of Americans, both individuals and companies are successful," he said.  (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)