Wells Fargo: Background

WELLS FARGO
Introduction:
 Wells Fargo & Company is an American multinational financial services company
headquartered in San Francisco, California, with managerial offices throughout the
United States and overseas.
 Wells Fargo was found in 1852 by Henry Wells and William Fargo in San Francisco,
California. The company offered banking where consumers could buy and sell gold and
paper bank drafts. In the 1860’s, they opened offices in other cities of the West and
“earned a reputation of trust by dealing rapidly and responsibly with people’s money.”
 The Wells Fargo account fraud scandal is an ongoing controversy brought about by the
creation of millions of fraudulent savings and checking accounts on behalf of Wells
Fargo clients without their consent.
 Wells Fargo clients began to notice the fraud after being charged unanticipated fees and
receiving unexpected credit or debit cards or lines of credit. Initial reports blamed
individual Wells Fargo branch workers and managers for the problem, as well as sales
incentives associated with selling multiple "solutions" or financial products. This blame
was later shifted to a top-down pressure from higher-level management to open as many
accounts as possible through cross-selling.
 Wells Fargo employees secretly opened unauthorized accounts to hit sales targets and
receive bonuses
 Bank employees opened over 1.5 million deposit accounts that may not have been
authorized
 Wells Fargo employees also submitted applications for 565,443 credit card accounts
without their customers' knowledge or consent
Background:
 Wells Fargo is a publicly traded company that was founded by Henry Wells, William
G. Fargo, and associates on March 18, 1852.
 During the era in which it was founded, stagecoach robberies were infamous. At that
time, they focused on safely transporting their money from Nebraska to California.
Now, Wells Fargo uses this stagecoach image as their company’s background and
main marketing techniques.
 Wells Fargo opened for business in the gold rush port of San Francisco, and soon
Wells Fargo’s agents opened offices in the other new cities and mining camps of the
West. In the boom and bust economy of the 1850s, Wells Fargo earned a reputation
of trust by dealing rapidly and responsibly with people’s money. In the 1860s, it
earned everlasting fame — and its corporate symbol — with the grand adventure of
the
 The bank used all means of transformation available during the 1860s to ensure the
fastest delivery of services across the western part of north America.
 Wells Fargo delivered business by the fastest means possible whether it was by
stagecoach, steamship, railroad, pony rides or telegraph.
 After the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, Wells Fargo
increasingly rode the rails. In 1888, after expanding along the new steel network
across the Northeast into New York, Wells Fargo became the country’s first
nationwide express company.
 It adopted the motto “Ocean-to-Ocean” to describe its service that connected over
2,500 communities in 25 states, and “Over-the-Seas” to highlight its lines linking
America’s increasingly global economy.
 Wells Fargo rushed customers’ business from the urban centers of New York and
New Jersey, through the rail hub of Chicago and farming regions of the Midwest, to
ranching and mining centers in Texas and Arizona, and to lumber mill towns in the
Pacific Northwest.
 Wells Fargo agents in towns large and small offered basic financial services like
money orders, travelers checks, and transfer of funds by telegraph. Always, though,
wherever there was mining, from Alaska to Arizona, Wells Fargo guarded the gold.
 By 1910 the Company’s network linked 6,000 locations, including new offices in the
Upper Midwest and Great Lakes regions. It was in these towns that the famed “Wells
Fargo Wagon” delivered goods of all sorts, from a grey mackinaw to some grapefruit
from Tampa, as the song from the Music Man goes.

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WELLS FARGO

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