Charles W. Scharf
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
2019 – Present
7 years (current)
Key Decisions & Impact
Scharf built a 24-year career across financial services and payments, including as a CFO at Citigroup and Bank One, CEO of Visa (2012-2016, where total shareholder return rose more than 130% as he pushed Visa toward digital payments), and CEO and chairman of BNY Mellon (2017-2019), before joining Wells Fargo in late 2019 -- about three years after the bank's fake-account scandal became public.
Legacy
Leads Wells Fargo's risk remediation, operating discipline, customer, and growth strategy; under his tenure the Federal Reserve lifted the seven-year asset cap imposed after the sales-practices scandal, freeing the bank to resume normal growth. Under Scharf, Wells Fargo has also worked to diversify revenue toward fee-based wealth management and investment banking rather than relying primarily on the retail cross-selling model that produced the scandal he was hired to fix. His experience turning around multiple large financial institutions across his career gave the Wells Fargo board confidence he could navigate both the technical remediation and cultural repair the bank needed simultaneously. This episode remains a frequently cited case study in banking-industry risk-management training.