Last fall, Wells Fargo was fined $185 million after regulators found the bank guilty of opening as many as 2 million retail bank accounts without customers’ approval. Over 5,000 employees tied to the scandal were fired. In a recent addition to this total, the head of the bank’s consumer credit-card business and three other senior managers were also fired.
The bank announced in a statement on Tuesday that it was firing: Shelley Freeman, former Los Angeles regional president; Pam Conboy, Arizona lead regional president; Claudia Russ Anderson, former community bank risk chief and; Matthew Raphaelson, community bank strategy and initiative leader. The four employees will not receive bonuses for 2016 and will forfeit unvested equity awards and outstanding options, according to Wells Fargo.
The board and management are both reviewing the proliferation of the practice, promising to hold managers accountable for the fraudulent activity.
Of the four managers fired, Freeman and Conboy were profiled by Bloomberg in a November story on banking supervisors. The profile described how these supervisors earned promotions through cross-selling, a practice in which one persuades an individual customer to sign up for more Wells Fargo products.
The board unanimously voted to fire the managers and expects to finish its review and investigation before the annual shareholder meeting in April. The panel is deciding which materials will be made available to the public after the review is complete. The panel may still release information on discoveries uncovered on the four managers, according to an anonymous source.
The board will most likely withhold the 2016 bonuses of some top executives, including CEO Tim Sloan and CFO John Shrewsberry, as a way of holding managers accountable for the bank’s performance, according to another source.
