Wells Fargo said Tuesday that its 2022 consent order with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau over automobile and mortgage lending and consumer deposit accounts has been terminated.
The order is the seventh against the lender that regulators have dismissed since 2019, Wells said in the release.
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency last February terminated a 2016 consent order related to Wells Fargo’s fake-accounts scandal that brought the bank under heightened scrutiny.
“I’m proud of the clear progress we’ve made on our risk and control agenda,” Wells Fargo CEO Charlie Scharf said during the lender’s fourth-quarter earnings call this month.
“Our operational risk and compliance infrastructure is greatly changed from when I arrived, and while we are not done, I’m confident that we will successfully complete the work required in our consent orders and embed an operational risk and compliance mindset into our culture,” Scharf added.
Scharf joined Wells in 2019.
The CFPB consent order said the San Francisco-based lender “incorrectly applied loan payments, erroneously imposed certain fees and charges, incorrectly repossessed customers' vehicles, and failed to refund certain unearned fees on debt cancellation products.”
Wells also allegedly denied mortgage loans to certain qualified borrowers, and “improperly” froze or closed customer accounts, charged incorrect overdraft fees, and failed to waive monthly fees as promised in its consumer deposit accounts services, according to the consent order. Wells Fargo had implemented fixes since 2020, but the CFPB moved forward with issuing a consent order under the Consumer Financial Protection Act, the bureau said.
Seven public consent orders remain outstanding for the bank, according to a company spokesperson, who declined to comment beyond the press release.
The Federal Reserve imposed an asset cap of $1.95 trillion on Wells Fargo in 2018. The lender has submitted a third-party review of its risk management program and controls for the Fed to analyze, with the goal of having the cap lifted, Bloomberg reported in September.
But the bank was hit with another OCC enforcement action last September, related to deficiencies in its anti-money laundering internal controls and the bank’s financial crimes risk management practices.
As the company has worked to meet regulatory requirements, the asset cap could be lifted as early as the first half of this year, people familiar with the matter told Reuters in November.
