Dive Brief:
- Wells Fargo is combining its treasury management and global payment solutions units under one umbrella — global treasury management — and is hiring a BNY Mellon executive to lead the effort, the bank announced Tuesday in a press release.
- Paul Camp, who has served since August 2018 as BNY Mellon’s CEO of treasury services, will join Wells in November and report to both Perry Pelos, the bank’s commercial banking CEO, and Jon Weiss, who leads its corporate and investment bank, Wells Fargo said Tuesday.
- The move marks the latest tweak to Wells Fargo’s structure imposed under CEO Charlie Scharf. The bank last year hired a new chief compliance officer and installed four chief risk officers (CROs) at the unit level. It also split its wholesale and consumer banking functions in February 2020, essentially turning three units into five.
Dive Insight:
Tuesday’s move — combining Wells Fargo’s global cash management and payments services operations into one arm — is meant to help the bank “leverage its capabilities more effectively to help clients manage their funds and process payments worldwide,” the company said.
It also brings aboard another of Scharf’s former colleagues. Camp worked alongside Scharf for a little more than a year when the latter served as CEO of BNY Mellon before jumping to the top role at Wells.
Camp wouldn’t be the first BNY Mellon executive to cross over to Wells in the Scharf era. The bank hired BNY Mellon veteran Mike Santomassimo in July 2020 to become its CFO. Wells Fargo’s chief operating officer, Scott Powell, is another C-level transplant who previously worked with Scharf at Bank One and JPMorgan Chase, and came to Wells in December 2019, two months after Scharf.
Camp has executive-level experience both at big banks and in the fintech sphere — an attribute Pelos noted in Tuesday’s press release. Camp served for three years as CFO, treasurer ad executive vice president of financial operations at Circle before joining BNY Mellon, according to his LinkedIn profile. He also held senior-level positions in cash management and transaction services at JPMorgan Chase and Deutsche Bank.
“Paul brings valuable expertise to this role, where he will develop a strategy focused on growth and innovation, serving large, medium, and smaller businesses alike,” Weiss said in the release. “We are excited to have him join later this year to lead our efforts to enhance products and services that are foundational to our client relationships.”
Concurrent with the transition, Wells Fargo’s head of treasury management and payment solutions, Danny Peltz — a 31-year veteran of the company — will retire Dec. 15.
Although many of Wells Fargo’s recent structural changes have centered on transparency, some, on the surface, may have seemed contradictory.
In onboarding unit-level CROs last year, Mandy Norton, Wells Fargo's chief risk officer, said, "Our new model will strengthen our centralized, independent risk management program, provide greater consistency in how we manage risk across our businesses, and better position us for the future.”
Scharf last summer said the bank had too many management layers, and too many resources dedicated to non-core activities. To that end, Tuesday’s move to combine global cash management and payments services is a consolidation of business units.
Scharf laid out a goal last year to cut billions of dollars in annual expenses. Some of that was accomplished through job cuts. But Wells Fargo also sold several of its units over the past months, including its asset-management business and student-loan portfolio.
