Page 16 - Wells Fargo Bank (C) Case Study

The Board

WFB has a fifteen-member board which includes top

corporate executives, former high-ranking United States
government officials, an accounting expert and an

academic. Ten of these directors were either female (40%),

Asian, African-American or Hispanic. Decisions were made
collectively and according to former CEO Richard Kovacevich

earned from $279,000 to $402,000. (4,12)

“No single person has ever run Wells Fargo and no

single person probably ever will. It’s a team game here.”

(4)

“Wells Fargo’s John Stumpf, the 2013 Banker of the

Year,” (4).

Some of WFB’s employees, in an effort to meet aggressive

sales goals, had opened bank and credit card accounts for

customers without their knowledge.

When the board discovered that its employees had been

behaving badly, even unethically and the regulators began

to investigate and public outrage grew its response was for

its executives to express shock at the revelations and assert
that they never directed the staff to act in such a

reprehensible way.