Fake Accounts and Artisanal Data

This turns out to have been an awkward thing for Wells Fargo Chief Executive Officer John Stumpf to have said about Carrie Tolstedt, Wells Fargo's head of Community Banking, when she announced her retirement in July: "A trusted colleague and dear friend, Carrie Tolstedt has been one of our most valuable Wells Fargo leaders, a standard-bearer of our culture, a champion for our customers, and a role model for responsible, principled and inclusive leadership," said John Stumpf, Wells Fargo's chairman and chief executive officer. It turns out that Wells Fargo's community banking culture involved creating millions of fake accounts for customers to satisfy the bank's frenzy for cross-selling products and services. And Tolstedt now gets to bear the standard for that culture, as the Senate investigates, Fortune reports that "she will be walking away with 124.6 million in stock, options, and restricted Wells Fargo shares," and shareholders have called for her to be held responsible for the fake accounts by clawing back her pay: Another investor said: "If this person presided over this, why no accountability? We have share-based pay so that it can be clawed back when people have been earning bonuses under false pretences, and if fraudulently opening client accounts isn't false pretences, then I don't know what is." Wells Fargo's cross-selling scandal is so odd because it is both at the absolute core of the bank's business, and also curiously irrelevant.