Bloomberg, April 3rd, 2019: Wells Fargo CEO stumble puts bank in familiar state of disarray
For the past 30 months, the investor case for keeping Wells Fargo & Co.veteran Tim Sloan as chief executive officer was his steady hand. His abrupt departure last week is bringing more turmoil instead.
The bank, already under fire from regulators and lawmakers, is again caught flat-footed as it starts what could be a lengthy search for a new CEO.
From the start, Sloan’s appointment to the top job after John Stumpf’s ouster drew criticism.
Those criticisms never faded. Lawmakers summoned Sloan to Washington for a hearing before the House Financial Services Committee. Democrats and Republicans took turns grilling the CEO for more than four hours, with several expressing doubts that the long-time insider should be running the firm. Things got worse as the hearing ended:The OCC issued a rare public rebuke of Wells Fargo’s progress.
The next day, Sloan met with senior OCC officials, according to two people familiar with the meeting. The conversation was tense, one of the people said.
“I thought it was very unusual, the aggressive approach that the OCC took in pushing this bank in the direction that it did,” John Taylor, president of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition and an outside adviser to Wells Fargo, said in an interview. “I don’t know what to make of it.”
