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"Doug [Braunstein] is a world-class banker," Wells Fargo CEO Charlie Scharf said in announcing his hire as vice chairman. "Expertise and business relationships reflect our continued commitment to strengthen" the corporate and investment banking division.
Wells Fargo CEO Charlie Scharf has added another heavyweight from his JPMorgan Chase days to his leadership team.
Doug Braunstein, a veteran investment banker and former top JPMorgan executive, is joining the $1.9 trillion-asset Wells Fargo on Wednesday as vice chairman. The hire comes as Wells Fargo continues its effort to turn around its once lackluster investment banking operations, a priority for Scharf as he looks to make the bank a bigger dealmaker.
"Doug is a world-class banker," Scharf said in a news release, saying his "expertise and business relationships reflect our continued commitment to strengthen" Wells Fargo's corporate and investment banking division.
Braunstein will report to Scharf.
The two were top lieutenants of Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan, where Braunstein held key investment banking roles before becoming chief financial officer and vice chairman. Scharf ran JPMorgan's retail bank before becoming CEO of Visa and later CEO of the Bank of New York Mellon.
The San Francisco bank says it has made more than 50 senior hires in its corporate and investment bank, which is focused on landing headline-grabbing deals as well as smaller middle-market ones.
Wells Fargo's investment bank still lags heavyweights such as JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, but has been steadily climbing the rankings. So far this year, Wells Fargo ranks sixth in U.S. merger and acquisition deals by volume, according to a scorecard from Dealogic and The Wall Street Journal.
"We're starting to see some green shoots — a bunch of deals that we wouldn't have been part of in the past, some activity levels increasing quite a bit," Michael Santomassimo, Wells Fargo's CFO, said at a UBS investor conference Monday.
The team is led by another former JPMorgan banker, Jonathan Weiss, who was part of Wachovia Corp. before Wells Fargo acquired the company and its investment bank in 2008. After Weiss did a stint in Wells Fargo's wealth management division, Scharf tapped him to run the corporate and investment bank.
Braunstein, who spent nearly two decades at JPMorgan, also brings some experience advising company boards and CEOs on financing issues and strategic alternatives. The bank says he's been involved in almost $1 trillion in transactions over his career. He has served on boards of companies such as Cantaloupe, Cardtronics, Eagle Pharmaceuticals and Talkspace.
In the news release, he said the bank is "uniquely positioned in financial services to build and broaden their client-serving lines of business." He also said Wells Fargo has "made a tremendous amount of progress across multiple dimensions over the past five years," since Scharf joined the bank.
Wells Fargo is still under an unprecedented asset cap that the Federal Reserve imposed six years ago, a response to a series of consumer abuse scandals involving the bank. But Wells has made progress in freeing itself from a handful of other consent orders with regulators, which analysts say is a sign that Scharf's compliance overhauls are working. This year, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency freed Wells Fargo from a 2016 consent order tied to its sales practices.
Braunstein's experience will make him an "effective advisor to Wells Fargo's senior management team on business issues beyond client development," Scharf said.
Scharf had previously hired Thomas Nides, a former Morgan Stanley executive and U.S. ambassador to Israel, to become the bank's vice chairman. But Nides left the company weeks after, saying the war between Israel and Hamas gave him "an obligation to turn my attention back to the region."
The Long Island bank is the latest financial institution to use new equity to restructure its balance sheet and unload low-yielding assets. Its stock price tumbled after the shares were priced at a considerable discount.
Affirm partners with Sixth Street to sell its buy now/pay later loans to the investment firm; Associated Banc-Corp promotes Steven Zandpour to deputy head of consumer and business banking; Visa Direct speeds up its money transfers; and more in this week's banking news roundup.
Banks will feel the fallout from a court's decision to strike down a Nasdaq rule that would have mandated more disclosure about the racial and gender composition of corporate boards.
The bank said it redeployed proceeds from the sale into high-yielding investments. It also said it would end an employee pension plan to curb expenses.
A close result was complicated by an hour-long adjournment of the New York-based company's annual meeting that angered dissident investors and left them mulling legal action.
