Wells Fargo Chief Risk Officer Amanda “Mandy” Norton will retire at the end of June, according to a memo from Chief Executive Officer Charlie Scharf distributed internally Tuesday.
In the memo, Scharf said Norton, who joined the bank in 2018, “took on an incredibly difficult task to build out an independent risk management (IRM) function appropriate for a bank of our size and complexity. Under her leadership, we have made tremendous progress, and our risk organization is completely different from what existed when she arrived.”
Norton “has strengthened all areas of risk management—financial and nonfinancial—and enabled heightened oversight of our lines of business, with chief risk officers aligned to each one. We now have far deeper expertise embedded within key IRM roles, and Mandy has helped drive a clearer understanding of roles and responsibilities between the first and second lines of defense,” added Scharf.
In the memo, Scharf quoted Norton as saying she is “‘immensely proud of the work the IRM team has done to transform the company, and I am confident in their ability to continue to enhance risk management holistically across the company.’”
Scharf said the bank would announce Norton’s successor in the coming weeks.
Norton joined Wells Fargo from JPMorgan Chase as the former was attempting to recover from its fake account scandal that surfaced in 2016. In February 2020, Wells Fargo agreed to pay $3 billion in civil and criminal penalties to the Department of Justice and Securities and Exchange Commission to resolve the issues.
The bank also entered into a three-year deferred prosecution agreement that ordered significant changes in Wells Fargo’s management and its board of directors, an enhanced compliance program, and significant work to identify and compensate customers who might have been victims of the fraudulent sales practices.
Since that settlement, Wells Fargo has had to address other deficiencies, including risk management failings in its home mortgage servicing division that led to a $250 million fine levied by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency in September 2021. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) asked federal banking regulators to break up Wells Fargo in the aftermath of the penalty, claiming the bank proved it is “ungovernable.”
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