Wells Fargo Chief Operating Officer Scott Powell will become the bank’s next chief risk officer when current CRO Derek Flowers retires in mid-January, the bank said Wednesday.
Wells will name a successor for Powell at COO “in the near future,” the bank said.
A spokesperson for San Francisco-based Wells, however, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Powell took on Wells’ No. 2 role in 2019, after five years at Santander, including as CEO of Santander Holdings USA. But he’s no stranger to risk management roles. Earlier in his career, he served as risk chief of Bank One’s consumer bank and, soon after, risk chief of JPMorgan Chase’s consumer business, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Powell worked with current Wells Fargo CEO Charlie Scharf at both Bank One and JPMorgan, and joined Wells at a tenuous time for the company – roughly a year-and-a-half after the Federal Reserve imposed an asset cap on the bank over its 2016 fake-accounts scandal. Scharf hired Powell at Wells about two months after the former began his stint as the bank’s CEO.
Powell leads Wells’ global operations, control management, corporate properties, corporate security, strategic sourcing, resiliency, customer complaints and remediations, and regulatory relations, the bank said. But he led the multiyear transformation of the company’s risk and control functions, and worked closely alongside Flowers in doing so, according to a statement from Scharf.
Flowers, meanwhile, will retire from the bank after a nearly 30-year career there. He became CRO in 2022, but, before that, led Wells’ strategic execution and operations office, oversaw its credit and market risk functions, and chaired its credit risk management and market risk committees.
“Derek played a pivotal role in strengthening our risk and control framework and fostering the strong risk culture that positions Wells Fargo for continued growth,” Scharf said of the retiring CRO. “On behalf of all of us at Wells Fargo, we thank Derek for his many contributions and years of service. We congratulate him on an exceptional career at Wells Fargo and wish him and his family all the best in this next chapter.”
Flowers, in a statement, called it a “true privilege to build my career at such an exceptional financial institution.”
“I am proud of what we have accomplished together and confident that our strong risk culture, talented team and commitment to our customers, position Wells Fargo for continued success,” he said. “I am grateful to my colleagues for their partnership and dedication.”
The executive switch-up comes at a pivotal time for Wells, which was freed from its asset cap last year. Once saddled by 14 consent orders, the bank has resolved them one by one since 2019.
“We’ve got a lot of degrees of freedom to make decisions on the direction of travel [the bank might take],” Scharf said in December about the bank’s newfound growth opportunities. “The world is our oyster now.”
The bank may not rush to name a new COO, however. Wells went without a COO for three years. When onetime CEO John Stumpf abruptly resigned amid the 2016 scandal, he was replaced by then COO Tim Sloan. The bank did not name another COO until Powell in 2019.
