Mikaela Tindera (1:57)

That's because Wells Fargo has been working on a Hollywood makeover of its own sort. It has a new appetite for megadeals, and that's a big break from its reputation as an all American consumer bank.

Akilah Quino (2:10)

Wells Fargo is known in the US for its retail franchise. Primarily, it's one of the oldest US banks and it for a long time kind of prided itself in being a Main street, not Wall street lender. But now that's changing and it wants to push further into investment banking and go head to head with its Wall street rivals.

Josh Franklin (2:28)

But many banks have tried and failed to do this. Even the CEO, Wells Fargo himself, has talked about the graveyard full of investment banking hopefuls on Wall Street. You think of the likes of Credit Suisse, Deutsche bank, rbs, they've all tried to go up against the likes of Goldman and JP Morgan. And what banks often find is it's a very different business. So there are cautionary tales and if this goes south for well could end up being an expensive mistake.

Mikaela Tindera (2:59)

I'm Mikhail Achindera from the Financial Times. Today on behind the Money, Wells Fargo has a new plan to push into investment banking. But can they surpass or even compete with their Wall Street R.

Wells Fargo Advertiser/Spokesperson (3:25)

Foreign?

Mikaela Tindera (3:31)

I'm here with the FT's US banking correspondent Akilah Quino and US banking editor Josh Franklin. Josh Akilah, welcome to the show.

Josh Franklin (3:40)

Thanks very much.

Akilah Quino (3:41)

Thanks for having me.

Mikaela Tindera (3:42)

So we're talking about Wells Fargo today as we've established. Now, I have to say this bank is old by American standards. It was founded over 170 years ago and you know, back in the day it really pushed out this image of being pretty folksy. Their ads leaned quite heavily on symbols of the old West.

Wells Fargo Advertiser/Spokesperson (4:06)

I am arriving by Wells Fargo with my grandson, a sturdy infant with a fine pair of lungs. Over the years, more people have trusted more things they really value to Wells Fargo than to anyone else.

Mikaela Tindera (4:19)

So could you tell me just briefly about Wells Fargo's history and its brand? You know, what is it known for?

Akilah Quino (4:26)

So Wells Fargo, unlike some of its Wall street rivals, was founded in the west coast of the US And San Francisco and it became known for financing the gold rush, you know, 173 years ago is when it was created. And since then it's known as a very American retail bank. So, you know, serving everyday people on Main Street.

Wells Fargo Advertiser/Spokesperson (4:49)

It's about time about convenience, about letting our customers bank wherever and whenever they choose. It's anytime, anywhere. Banking from Wells Fargo, like other US.

Akilah Quino (5:01)

Banks, they grew by acquisitions and they went from being a purely west coast bank to a coast to coast bank and the fourth largest US bank by assets. So that was made possible with the acquisition of Wachovia in 2008.

Josh Franklin (5:16)

Yeah, and you know, being a kind of Main street bank wasn't just a part of identity for Wells Fargo, it was part of its selling point. You know, it won't surprise listeners to hear that Wall street isn't very popular across the wider United States. And so being disassociated from that is actually seen as being a virtue, not a liability. And it's actually something that we saw play out in movies as well. You might remember a scene from the 2011 movie Too Big to Fail where all the big bank CEOs are meeting with the Federal Reserve Chair and the Treasury Secretary during the financial crisis. Everyone will be better off with more.

Wells Fargo Advertiser/Spokesperson (5:50)

Capital in the system. And that is why all nine of you will participate in the program.

Josh Franklin (5:58)

And you've got the CEO of Wells Fargo in the movie talking about, why do I need to take government money? I'm not one of you Wall street guys.

Mikaela Tindera (6:05)

Some of us don't need any capital.

Charlie Scharf (6:06)

You all need capital. You have no idea what the market's.

Josh Franklin (6:09)

Going to look like in a year.

Mikaela Tindera (6:10)

Neither do you. I'm not one of you New York guys with your fancy products. Why am I in this room talking about bailing you out?

Mikaela Tindera (6:19)

So Wells Fargo projected this reputation of being a dependable Main street consumer bank. And they more or less thrived off that image for many, many years. That is, until about a decade ago.

Josh Franklin (6:33)

Massive fraud at Wells Fargo Bank.

Mikaela Tindera (6:35)

Employees, under pressure to meet sales goals, created millions of fraudulent bank accounts. Between 2002 and 2016, they were hit.

Akilah Quino (6:44)

With a huge scandal that had enormous ramifications for the bank. They were found essentially to have inflated their growth by pressuring staff to, you know, move customers money into unauthorized accounts, forge signatures, open accounts without their consent. For years, Wells Fargo is suspected of.

Mikaela Tindera (7:03)

Creating nearly 2 million bank and credit card accounts without customer approval. Fees from those accounts toppled $3 million.

Akilah Quino (7:15)

So, you know, Wells Fargo's reputation was very damaged. Customers lost a lot of trust in the bank, which is quite essential when you're dealing with people's money. And they had this massive punishment from regulators, so they had to pay a lot of fines and remediations. These totaled to nearly $8 billion. But then there was the strongest punishment, which is very rare in Banking. The US Federal Reserve placed an asset cap of nearly $2 trillion on the bank. So that basically kept them from growing their assets. So their loans past the size that they were at in 2017.

Josh Franklin (7:50)

It's extremely rare to see a bank limited in this way by regulators, especially a bank of this size. And it's certainly nothing that we've seen since Wells Fargo's asset cap was put in place.

Mikaela Tindera (8:02)

So post scandal, Wells Fargo serves out this punishment from the Fed. And for the next several years, the bank is essentially stuck in the mud.

Akilah Quino (8:12)

It meant their growth was restricted, they couldn't lend more. They kind of had to stick to what they were doing. Meanwhile, all the other banks grew. It impacted their earnings, but it also changed their strategy. The bank had to work really, really hard to fix all of the compliance issues that had led to the scandal in the first place. And to prove to regulators that they could get that asset cap lifted and that they were in a good position to be free from that.

Mikaela Tindera (8:39)

Meanwhile, their competitors in the US start to pull far ahead of them.

Josh Franklin (8:44)

So if you think back to this period to 2017, when all of this happened, JP Morgan and Wells Fargo in terms of profits were about the same size. JP Morgan earned about 24 billion that year and Wells Fargo about 22 billion. Now you fast forward to 2025 and Wells Fargo's profits are still about the same at roughly 21 billion for all of last year. JP Morgan in the meantime, reported profits of 57 billion for 2025. So that just shows you how much more profitable other banks have become in the meantime.

Mikaela Tindera (9:16)

Coming up, Wells Fargo gets a second chance and plots a new path. Meantime, on Wells Fargo, the bank has been freed from a Federal Reserve asset cap that had limited its growth for over seven years. Last summer, Wells Fargo becomes unstuck.

Akilah Quino (9:39)

So Wells Fargo was finally freed of its asset cap. So, you know, it met all the requirements, regulators were satisfied, and I think people expected this would happen when it did. But the bank was free to grow in a different way.

Mikaela Tindera (9:53)

Wells Fargo CEO Charlie Scharf spoke about this in an interview on cnbc.

Charlie Scharf (9:57)

Well, honestly, yesterday versus today, the only thing that's different is the perception of Wells Fargo, which is incredibly important because we've always been perceived as being in the penalty box, being behind the eight ball in terms of what we can do.

Akilah Quino (10:10)

And until our regular Wells Fargo CEO, Charlie Sharif, he even said himself that, you know, before the asset class cap was lifted, he was hesitant to do too much media because people would always ask and ask and ask about this asset cap. But now we've seen a lot more of him, you know, touting Wellesley's new strategy.

Charlie Scharf (10:27)

But the reality is, going forward, as time evolves and as the world evolves, we have the opportunity to expand in ways, in a very methodical way, built on the processes that we built. But think about ideas and expand, expand in ways that we wouldn't have been able to do it when the cap still existed.

Mikaela Tindera (10:45)

Akilah tells me that Scharf, who's been the bank's CEO since 2019, is particularly well positioned to push into the area you heard about at the beginning of the show, investment banking.

Akilah Quino (10:56)

So the CEO, Charlie Scharf, is a 60 year old banker who's a very different type of banker to the ones that preceded him at Wells. He was involved in some of the biggest bank mergers in the 90s. With Jamie Dimon, he was a sort of protege of Jamie Dimon. He was involved in some of the big deals that led to what we now know as JP Morgan Chase and Citigroup. He then went on to lead Visa and then BNY before taking the job at Wells. And yeah, he's very much a kind of a deal maker and Wall street banker.

Mikaela Tindera (11:30)

Okay, Akilah, so let's talk more about this new strategy. Part of that is that Wells Fargo and Scharf want to have a much bigger presence in investment banking. So how are they aiming to do that?

Akilah Quino (11:41)

So a big part of this strategy is making this huge push into investment banking, which is basically the business of advising and underwriting corporate transactions. So for the investment bank, they've set some goals. They said they want to become a top five global investment bank, which means competing with a lot of those banks that are already very well known in investment banking, like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs. There's no clear timeline on that top five goal, but they have also set a wider profitability target for the whole bank. So the CEO, Scharf, he's actually said that after the asset cap was lifted. And I think the hope for the investment bank is that it can be a profitability engine and help with that wider target.

Mikaela Tindera (12:22)

Now, we've seen other banks try to push into investment banking, and it hasn't always gone so well for them. So what are some of the challenges that newer players have faced trying to break into this space?

Josh Franklin (12:34)

So investment banking is risky. So especially when you're providing debt financing for deals, the debt deals cannot go as expected, so you can suffer loss there. They're also expensive in terms of hiring people. You really have to go out and pay a lot of people millions of dollars in guaranteed salaries in the hope that they're going to eventually more than justify that with the deals that they're going to bring in. And that requires a strong stomach to do that. But within that, you also get big egos that, especially when you have a kind of more retail banking culture, doesn't necessarily mesh with the bank that you have already there. What Wells is trying to do here is basically the mirror image of what Goldman Sachs tried to do a few years ago when the quintessential Wall street bank tried to become a Main street bank. And that failed pretty spectacularly. Bank lost billions of dollars and just found it very hard to dislodge the Main street banks, one of which is Wells Fargo, and now has very much decided to stick to its knitting and just be a major player on Wall Street. And so what Wells is trying to do is. Is really the opposite of that, is to go from Main street to Wall Street. And what that showed you is just how hard a pivot that is to make.

Akilah Quino (13:44)

Huh.

Mikaela Tindera (13:44)

That's a really interesting point. So we know that Scharf has this Wall street background, but what about the rest of the bank?

Josh Franklin (13:51)

Yeah, I think what they have going for them is you have a lot of people in senior positions who aren't cut from the Wells Fargo cloth. You have a lot of ex JP Morgan people in there. So I think they understand the culture of the business they're trying to expand into, which I think is certainly helpful. And JP Morgan is probably like the best example of a bank that's been able to be profitable both on Main street and Wall Street. One of the other things Wells has going for it is the fact that it is an American bank. Often a lot of these firms that have come in to try to succeed on Wall street, they're often foreign banks that want a piece of the US Market. And that just brings its own challenges. You're. You're seen as. You're not a local player. Wells is a local American bank and then crucially, also is a top three player in US Retail banking, which is a fantastic market to be a scale player in with over a trillion dollars in deposits. So they can use that to try to bankroll their expansion on Wall Street.

Mikaela Tindera (14:46)

Okay. So they've built up a solid team, and they have this advantage of being a domestic bank too, but they have some big goals. What's Scharf's strategy to really make this a reality and compete with the top players.

Josh Franklin (14:59)

So really, there, there are two ways to succeed in investment banking. In blunt terms, you can lead with your brain or with your balance sheet. So for the brains, you can be someone's. Go to financial advisor, where you pitch them on smart ideas, can be like a close confidant to lead CEOs through complicated transactions, and they pay you a fee for doing that because they think you're smart. The other way is to be a big lender to fund deals and kind of put your money where your mouth is and commit financing for these deals using your balance sheet. So those are really the two main ways in which you can grow in investment banking. And I'd say Wells Fargo is probably trying to do a mix of the two. But like you see in the Netflix deal, where they're really leading with the balance sheet first, that's a great way to show that you're serious about this, about this effort, and that you're willing to commit capital to help clients do what they want to do.

Mikaela Tindera (15:51)

Hmm. Okay, Now, Josh, what about timing? Investment banking is pretty hot right now. You reported that 2025 was the sector's best year since the pandemic. But will there be enough deals to go around as Wells Fargo's trying to break in among its more seasoned competitors like J.P. morgan or Goldman?

Josh Franklin (16:10)

No, I think there's not at all anxiety. I think that there's not going to be enough deals to go around. I think a lot of people on Wall street think that the next couple of years are going to be an investment banking super cycle. They've been saying that for a couple of years now that that was eventually going to come. So we'll see if it actually ends up materializing in 2026. But people feel like things are just set up so perfectly for the next couple of years for there to be a lot of deals. And also, the Trump administration is taking some of the shackles off of the US banking industry that were imposed after the 2008 financial crisis. So I think for someone like Wells Fargo that wants to grow, the environment actually couldn't be much better for what they're trying to do.

Mikaela Tindera (16:50)

All right, so a lot of factors are working in Wells Fargo's favor, actually. But I've been thinking here, because a lot of our conversation has been about the bank's brand and image, it projects, you know, from the reliable Old West Main street lender, and then the impact that the fake account scandal had on their reputation. I mean, how might this new move impact their brand? And can they make that work in their favor?

Josh Franklin (17:15)

You know, even again, if you look at JP Morgan, they actually pretty much have two distinct brands. On the retail side, you've got Chase, and on the investment banking side, you have JP Morgan. And they're pretty distinct, not quite two separate companies, but certainly two separate identities. Wells, at least right now, is doing this all under the Wells Fargo umbrella. And so it's not to say that they can't do it, it's just what you go to Wells Fargo for. Do you go to them because you need a loan for something, or do you go for them because you want cutting edge advice about what I should do to deal with AI and manage that transition for my company? And so it's really kind of trying to show that the brand, what they are traditionally known for, now they're. They're more than that.

Mikaela Tindera (17:56)

Yeah. So how is it going so far? Are they securing deals and clients? We talked about Netflix a Little bit already, but what else have they got going on?

Josh Franklin (18:06)

So 2025 was certainly Wells Fargo's best year ever for investment banking. In total, Wells generated over $3 billion in investment banking fees across MA equity and debt underwriting, and that's the seventh highest of any bank, according to LSEG, which is the London Stock Exchange Group. It's just outside the kind of big five that Charlie Scharff has talked about breaking into. But I think it's important to also caveat that with the fact that it's coming from a pretty modest base, it's a little bit like saying you're the third biggest football team in Manchester. That factually true, but not as impressive as it sounds. That being said, it advised on two of the biggest deals of 2025 on the Netflix, Warner Brothers Discovery, although that's still pending, and then a major railroad deal in the United States, Union Pacific, Norfolk Southern. So it has really kind of shown that it can be competitive, and now it's just a question of how high they can rise.

Mikaela Tindera (19:02)

Well, what will you both be watching for in the coming year as Wells Fargo, you know, moves into its first year, into second year without this asset cap?

Akilah Quino (19:12)

So I think, you know, any more blockbuster deals that they're on, big hires, big names, and then the rankings at the end of the year, you know, whether they've gone up in terms of dealmaking, M and A fees, and whether they can continue in that push that we've seen in the last quarter or so.

Josh Franklin (19:29)

And in particular, I'm going to be looking to see whether or not they manage to win any clients that have been with other banks for a long time. So often these relationships tend to last for long periods, many years, and companies and private equity firms turn to the same bank or advisor repeatedly. So we're really going to get a sense in the next few years whether or not Wells is able to dislodge any of those relationships to show that they can be serious players in investment banking.

Mikaela Tindera (19:56)

Akilah, Josh, thanks for coming on the show.

Akilah Quino (19:58)

Thank you.

Josh Franklin (19:59)

Thanks very much.

Mikaela Tindera (20:05)

Behind the Money is hosted by me, Mikaela Tindera. This episode was produced by me and Safiya Ahmed. Fact checking by Simon Greaves. Sound design and mixing by Sam Giovinco. Original music is by Hannis Brown. Tover Forges is our executive producer. Cheryl Brumley is the FT's global head of audio. Thanks for listening. See you next week.