CEO, Consumer and Small Business Banking
Mary Mack, who oversees Wells Fargo’s roughly 4,900 branches, says in-person banking isn’t going away.
Sure, customers have rapidly adopted digital tools during the pandemic, and Wells and many other banks are continuing to trim their branch networks.
But Mack says many bank customers — herself included — prefer in-person help on life-changing moves like buying a home. Wells has been retooling its branches to adapt to those customers’ needs.
“They may research online, but when they go to make decisions, sometimes they want a little guidance,” said Mack, the bank’s CEO of consumer and small-business banking. “So we've really invested in our people and our skills to allow them to move more into that space of advice and guidance, not just transactional.”
That might not be the case for everyone, Mack said. One of Mack’s daughters has long done her banking online, and Mack had to show her what to do when she went to a branch to make a deposit for her house purchase. “The branch got a big kick out of it when I brought her,” Mack said.
Wells has shuttered hundreds of branches over the past couple of years as part of CEO Charlie Scharf’s commitment to rein in costs, but the $1.9 trillion asset-bank still has the largest branch footprint in the country.
Its branches process more than 1 million transactions a day, though employees are increasingly working on helping customers get comfortable using digital tools. Use of Wells Fargo’s digital offerings escalated during the pandemic, with digital logins rising 20% in the first quarter of the year compared with a year earlier and mobile deposit dollar volumes nearly doubling.
“Sometimes people just need a little help” to get going, Mack said.
Mack took over as consumer banking chief in mid-2016, just weeks before the bank’s fake accounts scandal made headlines. Mack, who previously ran the retail brokerage division, is one of the few senior executives Scharf has retained from that time.
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Wells was freed in September from a 2016 regulatory enforcement order tied to retail sales practices, but it remains under several other orders for various consumer banking infractions. Most recently, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency fined it $250 million for failing to meet the requirements of a previous consent order related to its mortgage practices.
“We’re very clear on the work we’ve got to do,” Mack said about resolving ongoing regulatory matters. “We’re getting the work done,” but “we certainly have more to do.”
Another of Mack’s priorities is a new Banking Inclusion Initiative, a 10-year partnership with community groups to reach the millions of Americans who do not have bank accounts, many of whom are people of color.
As part of the initiative, the bank is expanding its relationships with Black-owned banks, actively marketing its no-overdraft-fee accounts and piloting a new branch model in low- and moderate-income areas that focuses on financial education and advice.
“If you don’t have access to low-cost, digitally enabled, easy-to-access financial accounts, it makes life a lot harder,” Mack said.
