Bloomberg, February 8, 2018: Wells Fargo CEO confronts board overhaul he once called ‘crazy’
Wells Fargo & Co. Chief Executive Officer Tim Sloan said last year that a wholesale makeover of his board would be “crazy.” Well, now it’s happening.
The Federal Reserve last week barred the nation’s third-largest lender from getting bigger and said the bank will replace four unspecified directors by the end of 2018. They’re the latest aftershocks of a bogus-accounts scandal that continues to haunt the firm as new allegations of consumer harm emerge. Four directors have been added since September and, by year’s end, half of the 16-member board will have joined since Sloan said last April that an immediate overhaul would be “absolutely irresponsible.”
John Taylor, CEO of National Community Reinvestment Coalition and an outside adviser to Wells Fargo, said bank executives have been “very forthcoming” about the problems they intend to fix. Taylor is part of Wells Fargo’s Stakeholder Advisory Council, a group the lender started in December.
“They didn’t try to explain away any of their missteps,” Taylor said.
