Thread regarding Wells Fargo & Co. layoffs

SVB AMA Jan 19

Happy New Year to all of you. Remain safe and healthy at this point in time.
Long weekend. Thanks to teams involved in relaunch of PPP (COVID related stuff).
1300 loan applications in. Thank you for helping the economy in the US.
2001 (he meant 2021) will be a defining year.
We have money, support, talent, and leadership.
Paul is here, from a bank in Switzerland. Warm welcome.

Paul talks.
Has 100 VM's in his house.
(Somewhat hard to understand his accent)
Formula One fan. Teams working together and related technology.
He likes "spauwts". Trained with some team. Buffalo?

Microsoft Teams. Typical collaboration gobbledegook and buzzwords.
It's a chat. Groups, Channels.
Everybody gets the same information (I'll believe THAT when I see it).

Scale up model, not carving into stone. 2022 the company will be on Teams.
(sounds like "Teams" is their shiny new toy. Maybe it'll get them off their "agile" kick.)

BYOD. Pushes cost to us. Risk vs reward?
"Emotional subject because people are losing something".
My phone is my phone of choice.
Not more risk.
Container means personal stuff and work stuff doesn't "leak" together (if anyone believes this, I've got some waterfront property in Florida to sell you).
Carry one phone instead of two (so people can call your personal phone at 2am every so often - been there, done that - NO THANKS!).

Return to the office. This is the focus.
Read a bunch of questions, gave no answers.
RTO only when it's safe to return.
Vaccination program is struggling.
Discourage going to office right now.
Infections happening at offices. WFH if you don't need to go to office.
CDC messages. Legislation. Industry & other companies.
WF require people to get vaccinations? In the works. Legal issues. Sounds like WF would require it if they could, but maybe they can't force it.
Hot topic for operating committee. Framework to help LOB's come to a decision. Not a one-size-fits-all.
Different companies doing different things. Twitters/Facebooks say WFH forever. Google/MS backtracking on that stance. Concerned about culture, etc.
JP Morgan, BoA both want everybody back to office ASAP. (since WF follows JPM's lead, I bet this is what Chuckie will want).

Survey. Goes to 1000 people. 40% of the people respond.
15 questions about what you think.
Sentiment has crystalized. Was going down, now going up (as of end of year).
Please take survey if you get it.
96% of people say they're willing to put in Great Effort.
74% believe leadership communicates effectively, which is better than industry.
People don't think WF values employee input.
People don't think they can achieve their career objectives at WF. Lower than in the industry.
We want to be even or stay better than the market.
We have 7 months of survey history now.

Happy Birthday Holly situation.
Not the sender's fault.
Was only supposed to be to 7 people.
3rd party system. 25,000 distribution lists.
All Active and All Inactive people got put into the list overnight.
Mailstorm tool.
400 servers out of service. Queues draining and blocking across 450 servers.
It cannot happen again.
Reply All lead to more Reply All (ha ha ha).
Hard work to figure out afterwards.
He called the sender and spoke with her and made sure she knew it wasn't her fault.

Expenses. Net-net of global ups and downs. Digital and AIML, and more gobbledegook.
Down in defender spend. Down on consultant spend.
Stopping work, or having employees do it.
83 vendors then, to 10 now.
Lowered budget numbers where numbers existed, but where there was no plan.
Reduced management, less layers, less lines of communication.
Our expenses actually went up in 2020. They'll go down in 2021.

Displacements.
Yes. There will be some this year in Q2 and Q3.
Nothing too massive.
People will be informed in a way that they understand.
Will be severance.
Need to do that within the COVID timeframe.
Access will be revoked immediatly.
Only do displacements if we can't solve through attrition, closing open positions, or reducing consultants.
He admits he knows the numbers, but he cannot share those numbers. Non-public information that he can't talk about.

Cloud. High level strategy communicated last year.
Hybrid cloud. Multiple cloud providers (so we don't get Parlered, in case Google or Amazon decides that we're evil).
We had blinders on at first. Need to modernize. What is the capacity? Working all that out.
March 2021 they'll submit the business case and numbers to the Op Committee.
Our current stuff is antiquated and won't work. Need to invest there.
Test landing zone is in place now.

Objectives for 2021.
We already know what the objectives are (so how about sharing them with us....?)
Leadership letter normally gets written.
The objectives will be cascaded down in Feb.
They are important for sense of direction, and sense of belonging.
Engagement while outsourcing is happening. Doesn't really work.

Plural Sight had VDI issues in India.
Customer Journey Model. Leap of Faith. Sounds like it was a reorg.
Somebody else now owns onboarding of customers.
Customers have many accounts, and they spend across the whole spectrum. (uh oh.....)
What is the common footprint of a customer. How do we move on that. (uh oh......)
Some of WF is ahead of the pack, other BU's have to catch up.
Sometimes we do things to our customers because our systems are sore. How can we do better.
Need to be consistent, make the journey better.

Skills development.
Plural sight looks good.
People don't have time for career development.
We have 2400 hours per year. Minus vacation. Minus sick days. Minus meetings.
There is 40 hours a year for training. Includes mandatory training.
So every person has 32 hours available for training.
A 2021 objective will be to use those hours.
Plan your workload accordingly.
Track this time in stamp.

Solar Winds.
Orion software.
We don't use it.
There's things he can't talk about.
A patch had been hacked.
Banks were not targeted.
Concerning, and highly sophisticated. A wake up call.

We are communicating agile.
Transformation leaders for each CIO.
A big thing if you do it right.
Will talk more about it later.

Thank you for questions.
Fill out the survey if you get it.
2021 will be great.
Bye bye.

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| 2416 views | | 11 replies (last January 20, 2021) | Reply
Post ID: @OP+18ZN3tPV

11 replies (most recent on top)

Serious question, is information like this ok to be posted on here?

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Post ID: @1lss+18ZN3tPV

@OP- I want you know how much I enjoy your AMA. They are informative and spot on! I appreciate you sharing.

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Post ID: @qev+18ZN3tPV

only two notifications that he was drinking coffee, no real information communicated

new guy is a mini-me SVB

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Post ID: @abj+18ZN3tPV

Thank you for posting this summary. I had completely forgotten about the call.

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Post ID: @fxz+18ZN3tPV

Patch had been hacked. Concerning and sophisticated ?

Interesting. So the guy still doesn't understand that people are the single most vulnerability in the information security management? 16 character passwords won't save you.

You ask how this is not layoff related, while the nonsense attrition strategies (such as promoting location strategy in an era of working from home) are resulting in losing most skilled and capable employees.

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Post ID: @iuz+18ZN3tPV

@lof+18ZN3tPV - is a troll

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Post ID: @wyl+18ZN3tPV

This really should’nt be posted on here.

SVB doesn’t intend his calls to made available for the public.

Op, you are either clueless or unethical. Either way it is no excuse

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Post ID: @lof+18ZN3tPV

Thanks for taking time to transcribe! Not everyone can listen to every call. Did they say if they’re currently closing open job postings or if that’s something they’re doing down the road? Any indication when most of layoffs would be felt? I wonder why they think they’ll hit their headcount reduction targets through attrition. I’m betting their goal is fairly high.

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Post ID: @enl+18ZN3tPV

Interesting info thanks

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Post ID: @tbs+18ZN3tPV

This post doesn't belong here. Peddle it elsewhere!

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Post ID: @rdu+18ZN3tPV

Why would you waste the time transcribing a call that is of very little interest anyhow?

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Post ID: @jvm+18ZN3tPV

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