Discussion:
Create an Internal and external analysis of the company is the USA based on the intro below.
Wells Fargo: Intro
Wells Fargo is a large diversified financial services provider founded in 1852 by William Fargo and Henry Wells. It has approximately 260,000 employees worldwide and the current CEO is Timothy Sloan. The company provides retail, commercial, and corporate banking services to individuals, businesses, and institutions. It has the second highest annual revenue and net income in the industry behind J.P Morgan. It is headquartered in San Francisco, and in 2017 was recognized as the most valuable bank brand name in North America. It operates in over 35 countries worldwide and made a major acquisition in 2008 of Wachovia Bank. Wells Fargo is a mega-cap company with a market cap of 300 billion dollars and generates 95 billion dollars in revenue annually. The firm has the highest return on equity of all the big four banks (Citigroup, J.P Morgan, Bank of America, Wells Fargo) of 11.35%, return on assets of 1.15%, and a 22.57% profit margin.
This company was selected due to the recent scandal involving millions of fake accounts that were opened by the company to meet cutthroat targets. Many former employees talked about a "cooker pressure" environment where workers were expected to sell 8 products (credit cards, home equity loans etc.) a day or risk getting fired. It is estimated that around 3.5 million fraudulent accounts were opened to meet these targets. Wells Fargo clients began to notice the fraud after being charged unanticipated fees and receiving unexpected credit or debit cards. Approximately 5300 lower level employees were fired in response to the scandal along with several executives including the former CEO John Stumpf and the company had to pay 185 million in fines. After the scandal Wells Fargo's reputation tanked according to a survey of 1500 bankers. In the survey, negative perceptions of Wells Fargo increased to 52% from 15% before the scandal.
We believed this event created a unique opportunity to diagnose the root-cause issues leading up to the outbreak of the scandal and analyze corporate governance procedures as well as suggest turnaround strategies to improve the company and provide a framework for implementing these strategies.
We believe there are several business opportunities Wells Fargo is positioned to exploit that are centered on corporate governance improvement that will address the bank's main issue: Loss of trust by clients that have occurred as a result of the recent scandal. By focusing on these improvements we believe Wells Fargo can once again stand out to clients as a reputable and trustworthy organization.