Exclusive: Wells Fargo CEO on Charlotte’s value to the bank, remote work and AI
Last Thursday morning, straight off a delayed plane from New York City to Charlotte, Wells Fargo CEO Charlie Scharf sat down at a small round table on the 31st floor of Three Wells Fargo Center in uptown for an exclusive interview with The Charlotte Observer.
He was there to talk jobs, AI and what comes next for the bank. It’s been five months since federal regulators lifted Wells Fargo’s $1.95 trillion asset cap that handcuffed the bank’s growth as punishment for its widespread sales account scandal exposed in 2016.
Scharf, hired as CEO in September 2019, has worked to repair the bank’s reputation and is credited with stabilizing the company. In July, as a signal of approval of his leadership transforming the San Francisco-based bank, the board of directors named Scharf chairman of the board.
Wells Fargo has 211,000 employees companywide. Its largest employee base remains in Charlotte, with about 27,000 workers.
“We think we should be the most attractive employer here in Charlotte of any company that exists,” Scharf said.
The Observer spent over 30 minutes with Scharf talking about Charlotte's strategic role, workforce plans and growth prospects after the asset cap was lifted. Our conversation has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
How critical is Charlotte to Wells Fargo’s overall operations and strategy, and what is the outlook for the bank’s employment footprint in the city in the coming year?
Charlotte is incredibly important. We have more people in Charlotte than any other city in the country. It’s a great place for talent. We have a huge technology footprint. We have a huge risk management footprint. We have a lot of operations folks. But we also have finance marketing, a little bit of every discipline that’s here.
We have significant corporate investment banking presence, with two trading floors at our other building down the block. And people love being here. There are about 27,000 here in Charlotte, and then we have like 34,000 in the state. We don’t anticipate that changing.
You recently said in a Reuters interview that Wells Fargo shrunk its employee count from 275,000 to 211,000 since 2020. Is AI a factor in the workforce reduction?
We’ve downsized some of our businesses. It’s been a little bit in all the areas of the company over a period of time. Our home lending business is significantly smaller than it used to be.
We’ve been focused on identifying strategic hubs. We’d rather have larger, fewer locations around the country rather than having lots of small facilities. Charlotte is one of those. A lot of the (job) reductions have come in other parts of the country where we just didn’t have the scale of talent.
We think about strategic locations and not just sizes. Where do people want to live? Where do you have a high quality workforce you can draw on? And another important factor is locations where we can have a strong partnership with a good feeder of talent coming in through schools. In Charlotte and North Carolina, we’ve got great relationships with both the mayor and the governor.
They care about what we’re doing to provide opportunities for jobs at all levels. They’re interested in making sure that we’re getting what we want from the schools in terms of training. And they also interested in us being involved to the extent we can be helpful. So it’s a really strong partnership.
How is AI playing a factor in jobs at Wells Fargo?
It hasn’t at this point. But I think it’s complicated. AI will and already is helping us get a lot more productive. We’ve deployed tools in our technology organization where our programmers are 40% more efficient because of the Gen AI tools that we’ve given them. We haven’t reduced the number of people coding because of that. We’re just doing more work because we have that much demand for the work that they’re doing.
The way we’re thinking about it is when we look at all the things we do across the company, AI allows almost all jobs to be more productive.
I do think over time every company will (ask), do we need as many people as we currently have? We’re trying to think through those impacts and use attrition. It’s not going to impact every job equally. But we think it will help us get a lot more productive and get more work done.
Everyone needs to be trained on AI. Use the tools that exist in the marketplace, educate yourself on what AI can do and think through how that can be applied inside of the workforce at any level. If you understand how to use those tools, that’s someone that we want to have here.
What is Wells Fargo’s return-to-office policy. Can you talk about how that relates to employee morale, productivity and the bank’s real estate strategy in Charlotte?
We’re not thinking of doing anything differently than what we have today, which is broadly across the country, we’re three days a week in the office. For senior (employees), we’re four days a week. For most jobs in the corporate investment bank, it’s five days a week. Operations and branches have always been five days a week.
We do think that office time is really valuable, but at the same time, people value the flexibility. But we want to make sure that we have space for people who want to come to the office. I think there’s always this nervousness of whether it’s going to change, and it makes people worry, but we’re happy with our policies. As long as people are as productive as we think they are, it’s fine for us.
If there are people who are mandated to be in five days, and they think it’s really valuable to have a day at home, they might look for another employer that is willing to do that.
One of the things that we’ve learned, too, is that the success of the company also matters to morale, and people here feel great about the progress that we’ve made — the closing of consent orders, the lifting of the asset cap.
It’s been five months since the asset cap was lifted. What are the bank’s biggest regulatory challenges now, and how will Wells Fargo ensure it meets compliance expectations as it grows?
Having the asset cap lifted is a significant accomplishment for the entire organization. Thousands and thousands of people have put years of work and effort into it. It’s important that we build into the culture the importance of continuing to put risk management at the forefront of everything that we do.
We’ve got the opportunity across all of our businesses to grow loans, grow deposits, grow our corporate custom bank in ways that we were constrained. We can be more aggressive in how we market and how we ask customers for more of their business. That’s something that grows over a period of time, it’s very much relationship driven.
It won’t be a light switch going off where we automatically increase the size, or the balance sheet, dramatically.
Wall Street has earned a notorious reputation of junior bankers facing grueling hours and stress, leading to burnout and health problems, even death. How does Wells Fargo address that? Is there an hours cap?
We start with making sure that we’ve got the right amount of people across all the jobs that we have. If we see people putting in longer hours than is appropriate for their job, we ask, do we have the right number of people for the amount of work that we have?
I think we do a pretty good job of finding the right level of balance and so if you have that, you don’t have to put very specific policies in place.
As it happens, the same month the asset cap was lifted, Wells Fargo topped the second-largest building in uptown Charlotte with its name. How is Wells Fargo using its resources and influence through philanthropy in Charlotte?
Being close to and supporting communities is something that is our core value for a long period of time and something that I’ve just worked hard to reinforce.
We’ve given away $17 million in the last three years here, and $20 million to support small businesses coming out of COVID. (He explained that as part of the federal Paycheck Protection Program loan program during the pandemic, banks collected processing fees for the transactions. Wells Fargo’s added up to $420 million.) We said we don’t need to get paid a fee. It was not meant to go into the bank’s pocket. So we partnered locally to give that money to small businesses most in need.
One last, quick question. What do you think of President Trump’s proposed 50-year mortgage plan?
I think our mortgage market works really well.
This story was originally published November 17, 2025 at 5:06 AM with the headline "Exclusive: Wells Fargo CEO on Charlotte’s value to the bank, remote work and AI."
