The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency terminated a 2021 consent order against Wells Fargo related to loss mitigation practices in the bank’s home-lending business.
The termination, announced Monday, is the 11th consent order closed by banking regulators since CEO Charlie Scharf took over in 2019.
“We are pleased that the OCC has again validated our work and terminated this consent order in just three and a half years. This time frame is much improved from other historical orders, including two 2011 Federal Reserve orders which were terminated earlier this year,” Scharf said.
The 2011 consent orders he referenced – one concerning Wells’ legacy mortgage servicing activities; the other touching its legacy Wells Fargo Financial business – were terminated in February.
The consent order that closed Monday required the San Francisco-based bank to take “comprehensive corrective actions to improve the execution, risk management, and oversight” of its loss mitigation program, and restricted the bank from acquiring certain third-party residential mortgage servicing. At the time, it came alongside a $250 million penalty.
“This is our fifth closed consent order since the beginning of 2025,” Scharf said in Monday’s statement. “We remain confident that we will complete the work required in our remaining consent orders.”
Three consent orders against the bank remain, according to a spokesperson, including the 2018 Federal Reserve action that established Wells’ $1.95 trillion asset cap. The asset cap has cost the bank $36 billion in profits, Bloomberg has reported.
One additional enforcement action, a formal agreement with the OCC related to anti-money laundering internal controls that was announced in September, also remains.
The asset cap, no doubt the bank’s biggest enforcement hurdle, could be lifted as early as the first half of this year, sources told Reuters in November. A bank spokesperson declined to comment on that in February.
As of November, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-MA, remained a vocal opponent to Wells’ asset cap being lifted.
“Removing Wells Fargo’s asset cap based on the recommendation of a third-party analysis that Wells Fargo purchased for itself and was provided days after a fellow regulator slapped the bank with a 40-part enforcement action would harm consumers, threaten our financial stability, and reward a bad bank for continuing a long history of abusive and reckless practices,” Warren, the current ranking member of the Senate Banking Committee, wrote to Fed Chair Jerome Powell and former Vice Chair for Supervision Michael Barr at the time.
Last year, Scharf called the asset cap “a reputational overhang” for the bank, and said its removal is “an important factor in terms of how we’ll be viewed, as opposed to what we’ll actually do.”
An OCC spokesperson said the regulator doesn’t comment on specific banks.
