It’s not just Wells or Morgan Stanley…the entire sales-insaitable finance sector is rotten. See: “Many other banks around the country will have to review their own sales practices if they want to avoid regulatory scrutiny.” Some further insight into this culture is offered here:
Becky Grimes had trouble enough hitting sales targets as the manager of a busy branch of Wells Fargo in Austin, Texas. But when she moved to run a Wells branch in a much smaller farming town about two hours to the south in 2011, the same targets — 8.5 products per day, per banker — became too much to bear.It was the sign of an aggressive and pervasive cross-selling culture that forced her into early retirement in 2013, she says — and which has come back to bite Wells, the bank at the centre of a bogus account scandal.
Ms Grimes had four conference calls every day — at 9am, 11am, 2pm and 5pm — during which she was grilled by a district manager on the sales her team had generated. Staff would come to her in the interim, saying they had done a full profiling exercise on a particular customer, but she would have to turn them back to sell more.
“It was pretty ridiculous,” she says. “It bordered on harassment, quite honestly.”
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