• Wells Fargo launched a digital strategy group in 2020 amid a broader re-org.
  • Ather Williams III heads the Strategy, Digital, and Innovation team.
  • Williams detailed how the bank is re-designing how it goes about building tech products.

Since joining in 2019, Wells Fargo CEO Charlie Scharf has recast the top ranks of the bank, sold off once-core businesses like asset management, simplified business lines — and in some cases, created new divisions entirely. 

In 2020, Wells Fargo spun up a new group — Strategy, Digital, and Innovation (SDI) — to tie together its vast tech footprint on the back end and establish a unified online banking experience for customers on the front end. SDI is now headed by Ather Williams III, who joined Wells Fargo in 2020 from Bank of America and sits on Wells Fargo's operating committee, reporting directly to Scharf. 

Like all traditional banking players, Wells Fargo faces intense competition from fintech startups and Big Tech giants that, particularly since the pandemic began, have sought to offer customers easier, simpler ways to bank digitally. 

SDI is responding by joining together the bank's disparate tech offerings into one, simplified structure, Williams told Insider. In doing so, SDI is also one part of a broader effort taken by the nation's fourth-largest bank by assets to shake off a legacy of mismanagement that has led to a range of regulatory actions — from asset caps to fines — in the last decade. 

"The heritage of Wells Fargo has been very fragmented. It was very product focused, region focused. Every location was itself. It was an, '80 businesses under one roof' mentality," Williams told Insider. "The only way to do integrated banking is to create a coherent strategy that focuses on the client, not our own internal structure or product set." 

Amid a reset, competition from Big Tech

For Williams, a key goal of the SDI team is to make Wells Fargo more digitally competent in the face of increasing mobile options for banking customers. "I would argue that our biggest competitors are not the other large banks, it's tech companies," he said. 

SDI's task has been to re-design how tech products are built at Wells Fargo, and Williams said he's taking notes from Big Tech competition, as are others on Wall Street. 

Traditionally, finance split "people who understood bank products and regulation, and people who understood technology," he said. New app development was done in silos, communication between tech and business was fragmented and often drew little input from technologists to inform the necessary product requirements.  

"We've skipped that whole thing and mashed it together," Williams said.

The bank now maintains multi-disciplinary groups called "garages" that integrate various departments into one persistent team of product owners, tech people, business analysts, marketing, risk, compliance, and legal. 

Previously, the bank used to have different teams overseeing ACH, wires, real-time payments, and credit cards. Now, those different teams are combined into one "garage" that covers those different services, called "money movement" that will work together on new product development for the foreseeable future, Williams said.

The new team formations, along with Wells' investments in cloud technology, have sped up tech development timelines dramatically, Williams said. 

The bank launched a new mobile app in late-2021 within 10 months, something that would've taken "multiple years" without the cloud and SDI. The bank's new platform for commercial and investment banking customers, called Vantage, released in December, took 11 months to develop, Williams added.

The SDI group, Williams said, is ultimately designed to act as a bridge, not only between Wells Fargo's business and tech teams but also between large divisions that span different products and customers. 

Since SDI was established, the bank has brought on two new executives under Williams: Michelle Moore and Reetika Grewal. Moore leads Wells Fargo's consumer, lending, and wealth digital efforts, and Grewal is her counterpart within commercial and corporate and investment banking. 

It hasn't been easy to meld together different teams that, at least on Wall Street, haven't traditionally worked together. "You have to cross train these people," Williams said. "Now you have to teach business people about tech development and tech development people about how the business works. And, you know, that's part of the challenge."

Attention from regulators

Williams leads SDI at a critical time for Wells Fargo. This December, Wells Fargo agreed to pay a record $3.7 billion fine levied by the nation's top consumer finance regulator, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, comprised of $2 billion in damages to customers and $1.7 billion in penalties. 

According to the CFPB complaint, Wells Fargo unlawfully repossessed cars financed for customers by the bank, wrongly denied mortgage modifications, and illegally charged overdraft payments, among other violations. 

As Bloomberg columnist Matt Levine wrote after the CFPB's enforcement action became public, the consumer harm evident in the agency's complaint spoke as much to a lengthy string of technological errors committed by Wells Fargo as it did to deliberate malfeasance. 

"Our top priority is to continue to build a risk and control infrastructure that reflects the size and complexity of Wells Fargo and run the company in a more controlled, disciplined way," Scharf said in a statement in response to the CFPB action. 

In the wake of the CFPB announcement, Wells Fargo said it expects operating losses in the fourth-quarter to reach $3.5 billion. Wells Fargo reports quarterly earnings on January 13.