https://www.businessinsider.com/wells-fargo-tech-strategy-reorganization-product-development-2022-12
"The heritage of Wells Fargo has been very fragmented. It was very product focused, region focused. Every location was itself. It was an, '80 businesses under one roof' mentality," Williams told Insider. "The only way to do integrated banking is to create a coherent strategy that focuses on the client, not our own internal structure or product set."
Amid a reset, competition from Big Tech
For Williams, a key goal of the SDI team is to make Wells Fargo more digitally competent in the face of increasing mobile options for banking customers. "I would argue that our biggest competitors are not the other large banks, it's tech companies," he said.
SDI's task has been to re-design how tech products are built at Wells Fargo, and Williams said he's taking notes from Big Tech competition, as are others on Wall Street.
Traditionally, finance split "people who understood bank products and regulation, and people who understood technology," he said. New app development was done in silos, communication between tech and business was fragmented and often drew little input from technologists to inform the necessary product requirements.
"We've skipped that whole thing and mashed it together," Williams said.
The bank now maintains multi-disciplinary groups called "garages" that integrate various departments into one persistent team of product owners, tech people, business analysts, marketing, risk, compliance, and legal.
Previously, the bank used to have different teams overseeing ACH, wires, real-time payments, and credit cards. Now, those different teams are combined into one "garage" that covers those different services, called "money movement" that will work together on new product development for the foreseeable future, Williams said.
The new team formations, along with Wells' investments in cloud technology, have sped up tech development timelines dramatically, Williams said.
The bank launched a new mobile app in late-2021 within 10 months, something that would've taken "multiple years" without the cloud and SDI. The bank's new platform for commercial and investment banking customers, called Vantage, released in December, took 11 months to develop, Williams added.
The SDI group, Williams said, is ultimately designed to act as a bridge, not only between Wells Fargo's business and tech teams but also between large divisions that span different products and customers.
Since SDI was established, the bank has brought on two new executives under Williams: Michelle Moore and Reetika Grewal. Moore leads Wells Fargo's consumer, lending, and wealth digital efforts, and Grewal is her counterpart within commercial and corporate and investment banking.
It hasn't been easy to meld together different teams that, at least on Wall Street, haven't traditionally worked together. "You have to cross train these people," Williams said. "Now you have to teach business people about tech development and tech development people about how the business works. And, you know, that's part of the challenge."
Attention from regulators
Williams leads SDI at a critical time for Wells Fargo. This December, Wells Fargo agreed to pay a record $3.7 billion fine levied by the nation's top consumer finance regulator, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, comprised of $2 billion in damages to customers and $1.7 billion in penalties.
According to the CFPB complaint, Wells Fargo unlawfully repossessed cars financed for customers by the bank, wrongly denied mortgage modifications, and illegally charged overdraft payments, among other violations.
As Bloomberg columnist Matt Levine wrote after the CFPB's enforcement action became public, the consumer harm evident in the agency's complaint spoke as much to a lengthy string of technological errors committed by Wells Fargo as it did to deliberate malfeasance.
"Our top priority is to continue to build a risk and control infrastructure that reflects the size and complexity of Wells Fargo and run the company in a more controlled, disciplined way," Scharf said in a statement in response to the CFPB action.
In the wake of the CFPB announcement, Wells Fargo said it expects operating losses in the fourth-quarter to reach $3.5 billion. Wells Fargo reports quarterly earnings on January 13.