The document, Charlie Scharf recalls, was 3,162 pages. It included 6,000 tasks; 28,000 people had worked on it. This staggeringly long volume was the plan to save Wells Fargo, forged by Scharf and his team shortly after he took over as CEO in October 2019.
At the time, Wells had been laboring under a regulatory crackdown unleashed by the cataclysm that blackened the formerly burnished Wells name, the heavily publicized scandal revealing that the bank had bilked millions of customers by creating fake and unneeded accounts at its branches. That culminated in a draconian penalty imposed by the Federal Reserve: a hard limit on its total assets that essentially blocked Wells from raising the deposits that form the lifeblood of banking.
