Wells Fargo reviews

I am speaking for myself and also many current team members within the company, at least on the retail banking side of the company. The "strong sales culture" of Wells Fargo dominates every moment of working in a retail store. Most people do not realize how pervasive and important sales are in banking, unless they have worked in one. I did for 9 years, beginning as a Personal Banker (I jokingly referred to myself as a "Personal Slave") and working my way up to an upper level Store Manager with 25 team members and many thousands of transactions per month. I got those promotions primarily because of sales results. I'm certainly under no illusions about that. Fortunately, those sales were ethical and moral. I never trained or encouraged any TM to sell just for the sake of selling or to lie to customers. I feel a bank's most important asset, after their people, is their reputation. And I don't mean a AAA rating. I mean what the average customer would say about you. Ethics should be #1 as anything pertaining to money is reliant on confidence, including the value of our currency. Unfortunately, as I progressed, I found that the sales goals became increasingly difficult to reach. I saw other stores exceeding goal by 150% or more and initially, wanted to learn from those stores so I and my TM's could make bonus and receive recognition. Perhaps they knew something I didn't or were better at communicating with customers. What I found was that they had thrown all ethics out the door. I was shocked and appalled, especially with all the lip service WF gives about their high ethics and their dedication to helping customers succeed financially. So, naturally, I alerted my manager. I reported blatant cheating to the ethics line WF provides to team members. I alerted HR. Nothing happened to the offenders except promotions! I saw this time and time again. While I was being forced to fired amazing TM's just for missing goal, these heartless, cruel and selfish beings were being promoted! ..and still are to this day! My friends who still work there told me that they have been told not to call the ethics line about cheating sales anymore "due to a high volume of these kinds of calls". They are supposed to contact that person's manager. A lot of good that does since managers make huge bonuses based on what their employees produce...obviously, there's no incentive to fire unethical people when it hurts you in your pocket book. So the cheating of customers continues and is tacitly supported by upper management. The things that makes me most angry is the disregard to human beings: both customers and front line team members. It all boils down to numbers and profit. While I realize companies are in business to make money, the amount of profit this institution generates is mind boggling. The biggest "fee income" generator for the state of Arizona is on Direct Deposit Advance...just another name for payday loans. Usury. Team members know what it does to customers and their lives and have been vocal about getting rid of it. They know it's wrong, but since it's such a money maker, the bank continues offering that "service". For TM's, it's like this...sell sell sell. Nothing else matters...customer service, being kind to other employees, working hard, trying to give proper advice to customers, intelligent recommendations...NONE of it matters except your numbers. YOU don't even matter...except for your numbers. They talk a good game about people being their competitive advantage, but after you begin working there, you will see the truth.