Richard Kovacevich and John Stumpf were involved and pushed their cross selling from the top down.
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If only our current "leaders" were as focused on who was really at fault as the folks in this thread, maybe we could have some semblance of morale. As it is, the useless hacks in NYC constantly blame employees that had nothing to do with any scandal and drag us through the mud over it year after year after year. No matter how many are fired or go to jail, it never ends.
I agree with the commenter that in the face of wokeness and pursuit of diversity, equity, and inclusion. The male CEOs should go to prison with her.
The whole batch of CEO's need to go to jail - Kovacevich, Stumpf, Sloan. Stumpf should have done some time with the whole SVU mess that came up before the fake accounts broke.
They all need to be scared now, people are upset with the recent bank failures and are smelling blood.
To have DEI in this matter, one of the two men should accompany Carrie to sweet home. Jeffrey Keith Skilling of Enron went to jail being CEO. That's why they get paid so much i think. I don't want that job.
Wait a minute here. The wikipedia page said that Kovacevich still had an office and personal assistant at WF even in October 2020. The sales scandal was made public in 2016. He definitely was involved.
Kovacevich was still at Wells Fargo until 2009 running the board as chairman Sales scandal became known in early 2000.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Kovacevich?wprov=sfla1
Wells Fargo
He relinquished the presidency of Wells Fargo to John Stumpf in August 2005. On June 27, 2007, the board of directors elected Stumpf CEO, with Kovacevich retaining the chairmanship.
In September 2009 Wells Fargo announced Kovacevich would step down as chairman and a director at the end of 2009 and retire from the company in early 2010 after 23 years with Norwest and Wells Fargo. As of October, 2020, it was reported that he still had an office and personal assistant at Wells Fargo.
these dirtbags are all connected. Looks at their ties, families, "secret clubs", etc. sleevy f*cks
https://www.barrons.com/articles/SB939439126362436146
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BARRON'S FEATURES
King Of The Cross-Sell
By By Phil Roosevelt
Oct. 11, 1999 12:01 am ET
T o Richard Kovacevich, there's nothing quite as inspiring as the grocery aisle at WalMart. He marvels at how the retailer lures people with bread and milk, then sells them everything from golf ba--s to television sets. "It's the ultimate cross-sell," he says. Kovacevich, chief executive of Wells Fargo, is the banking industry's king of cross-selling. He has made a career out of selling more and more financial products to the same people, and he's now doing it on a grand scale. Wells Fargo, which last year merged with Minneapolis-based Norwest, wants each of its 15 million customers to take eight products, up from three now. The industry norm is two.
CEO Richard Kovacevich: "We just have to get out there and hustle."
The San Francisco-based bank is off to a good start. The merger integration is moving ahead smoothly, and Kovacevich (Koe-VAH-suh-vich) is starting to fill out the empire with smaller deals. Late last month, for example, he snapped up a Seattle brokerage firm, a community bank outside San Diego and a real-estate investment bank in New York.
But Wells Fargo's biggest opportunities, he says, are right under its nose. "If we can sell home equity loans to 25% of our customer base, which we can, why not the other 75%?" he asks. "I would argue that it's because we haven't asked the other 75%."
Plenty of other financial giants have taken a crack at cross-selling-mostly with little success. But Wells, the nation's third-largest bank in market capitalization ($68 billion), has something special going for it: Kovacevich. "He's a huge believer in cross-selling. He wakes up every morning thinking about it," says Ken Charles Feinberg, portfolio manager of Davis Selected Advisers.
Kovacevich, 55, earned his marketing stripes at General Mills, then moved to Citibank, running its New York City branches in the 1970s and launching its pioneering automated teller machine system. In 1986, he jumped to Norwest and turned it into one of the country's most admired banks. Then, last year, Norwest snapped up Wells for $32 billion. Kovacevich decided to keep the Wells name and its famous stagecoach logo, along with its San Francisco headquarters.
The new Wells sports a massive network of nearly 6,000 offices -- or "stores," to use a word that has endured from Norwest. That includes banking offices throughout the West and Midwest, plus a coast-to-coast collection of mortgage and finance-company offices.
And at a time when financial services companies are falling all over themselves talking about their Internet strategies, Wells is the largest player in the business, with over a million online banking customers, and 100,000 new ones joining up, on average, each month. Interestingly, Kovacevich chooses not to play up his company's Internet story, citing it as simply an extension of Wells' basic business. This stands in sharp contrast to Bank One -- run by Kovacevich's Stanford Business School classmate John McCoy -- which is heavily promoting its independent Internet banking unit, Wingspan.
Wells' sprawling operation pumps out everything from checking accounts and CDs to mutual funds, annuities and commercial realty loans. By selling more products to the same customers, Kovacevich says, he boosts profits, keeps customers longer, learns more about them and, as a result, is able to sell them still more. "It's the only perpetual-motion machine I've ever seen," he says.
In the markets he's been plying the longest, like Minnesota, he's up to almost five products per customer. Kovacevich is now importing the sales know-how of Norwest to California and other markets of the old Wells. So far, the results are encouraging: Daily sales per California banker popped 24% in the first half of this year.
All of which is making Wells' stock look intriguing. Since late August, the shares have slipped to about $41 from $44 on interest-rate jitters. But Wells may be better-positioned than most banks to handle rate hikes. Its net interest margin, a key measure of bank profitability, actually has improved a bit in recent months, notes Feinberg of Davis Selected Advisors. What's more, the stepped-up selling could lift revenues noticeably by early next year.
Ruchi Madan of PaineWebber has a 12-month target of $50 for the stock, which is conservative compared with some of her colleagues'. She thinks Wells not only will boost its earnings, but will win a price-to-earnings multiple well above the norm for banks. Right now, Wells trades at 15.5 times Madan's estimated net for 2000, or 5% more than other banks. Madan bets that premium will climb to 20% -- the same as the old Norwest. Wells shares look even cheaper when measured against cash earnings, which exclude charges for goodwill taken on in acquisitions; the shares trade at 13.75 times estimated cash earnings for 2000.
Things weren't looking nearly so bright when the merger closed a year ago. Many saw the newlyweds as the oil and water of banking. Norwest was the ultimate "high-touch" bank, known for its cheery stores and rollicking pep rallies. Wells was high-tech and grim. It had been firing employees, closing branches and shooing customers to ATMs and the Internet.
Somehow, Kovacevich is pulling it all together. A Tacoma, Washington, native with Hollywood-style good looks, he brings considerable personal charm to the job. Many a staffer has melted after receiving one of his congratulatory notes ebullient, handwritten missives bristling with exclamation points. However, he can be tough. On the rare occasion that he flashes some anger, "it doesn't feel good at all," a top executive says.
He can also be quite unbankerly. Earlier this year, he took to the stage at a sales bash dressed as Mick Jagger, complete with a wig, mauve tank top and shades. To howls of delight, he belted out "Satisfaction." The folks from the old Wells had never seen anything like it. "I turned to a friend and said, "You know what, we're not in Kansas anymore,' " recalls Terri Dial, an executive president of the new company.
Meanwhile, Kovacevich keeps stoking his cross-selling machine. Norwest's home-loan unit -- already the nation's second-largest originator of mortgages -- recently set up shop in Wells' California branches. That's a big change from 1994, when Wells beat a full retreat from home loans because it was too small to compete. Bankers from the old Wells, for their part, are showing Norwesters a thing or two about cost control. The new company's non-interest expenses have dropped to 58% of revenues from 62% a year ago.
So, what will Kovacevich do next? Some think he'd like to buy a big East Coast bank like Charlotte-based First Union . But Kovacevich shows little interest. He says he'd rather consolidate his gains in the Midwest and West. "I don't see us as a national bank," he maintains.
The more likely quarry: smaller banks in "Midwesternish places we're not in," like Missouri, Oklahoma and Kansas, Kovacevich says. Kovacevich is an old pro at that game. Norwest used to acquire more than a dozen community banks every year. If the price were right, however, he says he might consider a bank as large as $50 billion in assets, or one-quarter of Wells' size. Analysts suggest Comerica in Detroit, a $37 billion-in-assets institution now in a stock slump. Neither company would comment.
James Schmidt, who heads up financial-services investing for John Hancock Advisers, has another idea: Commercial Federal , a $13 billion Omaha thrift active in the states Kovacevich mentions. Right now, the thrift is under pressure to sell by investor Michael Price's Franklin Mutual Advisers. Schmidt, whose outfit holds both Wells and Commercial Federal stock, bets the thrift shares would fetch in the "mid-30s" in a takeover, up from about 20 recently. Commercial Federal and Wells declined to comment.
Kovacevich is also open to specialty businesses like asset managers and finance companies. "The area we're farthest behind in, and need to move ahead on, is the whole investment and insurance area," he says. There's been some talk that he'd like to buy ReliaStar Financial , a Minneapolis-based life insurer run by his friend John Turner. With a market value of $2.8 billion, it, too, would be quite digestible. ReliaStar and Wells both declined to comment.
It could be at least another year or two before Kovacevich attempts another true mega-merger. Indeed, he still has some big loose ends to tie up from the last one. Wells is just beginning to pull together the computer systems of Norwest and the old Wells, and it has chosen to do much more mixing and matching than is common. "We are doing the most complex systems conversion anyone has ever done in banking," he says.
The computer work, when complete in early 2001, should be a big boon to sales. All customers in Wells' territories will have access to the same products. And Wells will begin promoting its brand vigorously. At that point, the mission will be simple, he says. "We just have to get out there and hustle."
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Norwest bought Wells Fargo. Kovacevich was the boss of tolstedt and stumpf.
There's nothing wrong with trying to sell customers on getting new products. There is a problem when your sales group is told they must sale 25% more yr after yr and you push people so far that they're opening dummy accounts to meet objectives, and then you see a trend of misdeeds and then don't correct the incentive program. That's where they screwed up. They won't be able to pin anything on Di-k, the guy was retired for yrs. Stumpf though needs to do time because he was the captain of the ship.
No she didn’t. Stumpf was her boss. He needs to be next.