Partners in crime........garbage in garbage out
Wells Fargo faces lawsuits over mortgage loans
Dan Freed
Fri Nov 3, 2017 / 3:32 PM ED
http://mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKBN1D3227
(Reuters) - Wells Fargo & Co is facing litigation over previously disclosed sales problems related to its auto lending and mortgage businesses, the bank disclosed in a regulatory filing on Friday.
The lawsuits include two class action cases alleging violations of federal and state consumer fraud laws, as well as claims brought by former employees who said they were fired for raising concerns over problematic sales practices. Wells Fargo disclosed the litigation in its third-quarter financial filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
"The disclosures included in our filing today reflect the company's continued commitment to transparency. Our top priority is to rebuild trust, and we remain focused on making things right for our customers, team members, community partners and shareholders," a company spokesman wrote via email.
The third-largest U.S. lender has spent more than a year trying to rebuild its reputation following a sales scandal that led to the departure of its CEO and a companywide overhaul of its business practices. The company says it is continuing to review all its businesses to root out bad practices.
Wells Fargo's problems came to light several years ago, but did not receive widespread attention until Sept. 9, 2016, when it reached a settlement with three regulators over creating as many as 2.1 million fake accounts as branch employees scrambled to hit sales goals.
The bank later said that number could be as high as 3.5 million, and it has also been turning up other problems, including selling unneeded auto insurance to customers and concerns over fees it charged mortgage customers for locking in interest rates. One lawsuit filed in August over the interest rate lock issue said Wells Fargo managers pressured employees to blame homeowners for delays that resulted in improper charges, sometimes by falsely stating that paperwork was missing.
Wells Fargo shares were down 0.3 percent at $56.29 on Friday afternoon. Its shares are up just over 2 percent year to date, compared with a rise of more than 25 percent for Bank of America Corp shares and a gain of more than 17 percent for JPMorgan Chase & Co.
Reporting by Dan Freed in New York; Editing by Frances Kerry and Matthew Lewis)
ANZ and Wells Fargo test distributed ledger tech for correspondent banking
10 October 2016
Wells Fargo and Australia's ANZ have built a shared distributed ledger platform prototype for correspondent banking payment reconciliation and settlement. In a process facilitated by Swift, for decades banks have made correspondent relationships with partners in other countries to access their local payment systems and currencies in order to carry out cross-border transactions. But because the system relies on a bank opening a local currency, Nostro, account with the foreign provider, there ends up being two separately held versions of the account statement that need to be maintained and reconciled.
ANZ and Wells Fargo say that this leads to poor payment transparency, onerous reconciliation activities and investigations, delays in advising of fund disbursement, and inefficiencies in management and usage of liquidity and funding. The pair argue that blockchain can help address these problems by creating a single record of account that can be shared and maintained by lots of correspondent banks. The two banks have delivered a proof of concept, creating a shared distributed ledger platform they say demonstrates the potential to improve the efficiency and speed of cross-border correspondent banking payment reconciliation and settlement, while operating in parallel with existing infrastructure.
Nigel Dobson, GM, wholesale digital and transformation projects, ANZ, says: "The success of our proof of concept highlights what can be achieved when technology and business innovation are combined with cross-industry collaboration." Dobson hopes the results will form the basis of further discussions and knowledge-sharing across the industry. "While this joint initiative has advanced our collective thinking on innovations in this space, the networked nature of both this problem and the proposed DLT solution means the full benefits will only be realised through broad industry participation and adoption," he says. Read a white paper on the project here: » Download the document now 4.4 mb (PDF File)