Vanilla, or Vanilla?
Jim Westlake has been around long enough to know when not to compete.
Westlake, the chief executive of Royal Bank of Canada's RBC Bank, was a speaker Tuesday at the North Carolina CEO Forum and, because of a last-minute shift, appeared on stage shortly after Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, the iconic founders of Ben & Jerry's Homemade Inc. The ice cream moguls raised the bar high, supplying free samples of their products throughout the daylong event.
How do you follow that up? For Westlake, deadpan Canadian humor was the answer.
"Unlike Ben and Jerry, bankers don't give out free samples," he said in his opening remarks. "I can dispel that myth right now."
Perils of Openness
Over the past year, Wells Fargo & Co. has worked to ditch a long-nurtured reputation for being tight-lipped.
"We have a much more aggressive media outreach than we ever did," Patricia Callahan, the bank's human resources head, noted near the end of Wells' two-day investor conference last week — its first since the Norwest merger a dozen years ago.
The glasnost is giving Wells' management frequent practice in parrying unusual questions on the fly. Wells was briefly stumped by NAB Research analyst Nancy Bush's query about a foreclosure-related PR blowup last fall.
"I can't resist asking this question," Bush opened, before prodding Wells over what it has done to prevent employees from taking advantage of foreclosed properties, as a senior vice president in Wells' commercial bank did by throwing parties in a $14 million foreclosed Malibu beach house last fall. "Thank God she didn't steal the parrot, or it would have been the perfect storm," Bush said, referencing an even more embarrassing foreclosure episode at Bank of America Corp.
Callahan made a valiant effort to shift the subject to Wells' generally strong culture, but Bush demanded specifics. CEO John Stumpf stepped in. "We've learned that when you take back houses, you probably better do it through the mortgage company," he said. "There was learning from this."
Take-Home Pay?
Forget the ski mask. The crafty bandit who robbed a Chase bank last week in North Richland Hills, Texas, pulled off the heist disguised simply as a bank employee.
Photos taken from bank surveillance cameras and released by local police showed the suspect wearing dark pants, a light-colored button-down shirt, a tie and a Chase employee identification card as he strode through the bank. According to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the man identified himself as a member of the bank's staff and asked to speak to the manager before he gained access to an undisclosed amount of money and fled.
The suspect remains at large.
