Wells Fargo's latest layoffs may signal bank is on the mend – San … – The Business Journals

Wells Fargo & Co. is cutting more than 300 jobs in one area of the bank where cutbacks may signal good news: complaints and remediations.
The San Francisco bank (NYSE: WFC) is cutting 316 jobs in the Portland suburb of Hillsboro, Oregon. 
“Wells Fargo is informing you that it has made the decision to exit the Enterprise Complaints and Remediations group within the Chief Operating Office business unit,” Wells said in a filing with Oregon regulators. (Regulators said Friday that the bank hasn’t filed any California WARN notices in August or on Sept. 1.)
Those working in Wells Fargo’s enterprise complaints and remediations group may have thought that they were on a secure career track, given the remediations Wells Fargo has had to make since the bank’s fake-accounts scandal first came to light with regulatory fines announced in September 2016. Just last month, Wells agreed to pay a $35 million fine to the Securities and Exchange Commission for overcharging clients for investment advisory services after providing remediation of $40 million to affected clients.
The Oregon layoffs may suggest the bank is making progress in righting the ship. It’s not clear if the enterprise complaints and remediations group will be reorganized under another part of the bank, or if its duties will be distributed to other business units.
Asked about what the layoffs mean, the bank simply said Friday: “We regularly review and adjust staffing levels to align with market conditions and the needs of our businesses.”
With these layoffs, Wells is following its standard practice of helping affected employees find other jobs within the bank or offering severance and career counseling to those who don’t. The bank said that it expects most, if not all, of the employees to accept severance packages.
Wells Fargo continues to operate under several regulatory consent orders and an asset cap of $1.95 trillion, which the Fed imposed in 2018.
In recent years, Wells CEO Charlie Scharf has taken advantage of the bank’s quarterly earnings calls to rein in analysts’ expectations on when the bank may resolve issues tied to the asset cap and other punitive measures.
“We still have a substantial amount of work to do,” Scharf told investors last year. “It’s really not right for me to talk about any specific consent order and where we think we are in the process.
“Ultimately, what’s going to matter is whether our regulators believe it’s done to their satisfaction.”
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