Wells Fargo’s chief risk officer Mandy Norton, a key figure in the US bank’s efforts to improve its risk controls following a vast mis-selling scandal, is stepping down from her role.
In a memo to staff on Tuesday, Charlie Scharf, Wells’ chief executive, said Norton would leave the bank at the end of June and that a successor would be announced “in the coming weeks”.
“As I’ve said consistently over the past two years, strengthening our risk and control infrastructure is our top priority, and Mandy has been central to that effort,” Scharf said in the memo.
In a separate internal memo, Norton, who joined Wells in 2018 from JPMorgan Chase, said that through the pandemic “I’ve realised that now is the time to do some things I want and need to do outside of my career”.
Wells is still dealing with the fallout from the mis-selling scandal, which emerged in 2016 when Wells was found to have encouraged fraudulent sales practices, including opening millions of sham deposit and credit card accounts.
The wrongdoing has cost Wells billions of dollars in penalties. Most recently, the bank was fined $250m by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, a banking regulator, for its failure to meet risk management requirements in a 2018 OCC compliance consent order.
The Federal Reserve has also imposed an asset cap on Wells since 2018, limiting its growth until it improves its governance and internal controls.