Mary Mack didn't plan to go into banking. And yet, after 39 years in the field, in the summer of 2023, she retired from Wells Fargo, having worked for the bank and its predecessors her entire career. A longtime Most Powerful Women in Banking honoree, she was most recently CEO of consumer and small-business banking, based in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Mack accepted her first banking job because her then-boyfriend, now-husband, whom she met while at Davidson College, was planning to practice law in South Carolina. (He still does; they had three daughters and expect to become grandparents this fall.)
As a college senior, she was tapped to travel around the country with the school's president and speak to business leaders about the value of a liberal arts education. After an informational session with three bank CEOs, all reached out with job offers — but only one, First Union, was willing to let her live in the Charlotte area, close to the South Carolina border.
"First Union said, we understand your happiness is an important part of the equation. If you do your part and show up, that matters to us as well," Mack recalled. So after her 1984 graduation, she began as a commercial-banking trainee in a six-month program, working on spreadsheets for credit packages, and then moved on to become a small-business banker in a branch.
"I thought that I would take this job in banking, which seemed really boring and not at all what I thought I'd do, and I'd meet a customer and go work for them at some point, and make something tangible," she recalled. "And that hasn't happened yet and so here I am."
In 2008, during the financial crisis, Wells Fargo bought Wachovia, which had merged with First Union in 2001. Mack stayed through it all. For two decades, she was in the wholesale units, then in the foreign investment bank.
As a commercial banker, she worked with clients; then she became a manager, a job she loved because she was able to help "people figure out how to be successful in this environment early in their careers, or help a team that needed a turnaround," she said. In her third decade, Mack switched to retail, heading the brokerage division, Wells Fargo Advisors. "I love the brokerage because advisors are there to really listen and help tailor a plan for you," she said. "We can digitize a lot of that, but people still like to talk to people in moments that matter."
Cleanup crew
In the summer of 2016, Mack moved to the bank's retail arm, known internally as the Community Bank. That was just as the bank was reeling from the fake-account scandals that put it in regulators' crosshairs.
"The call I got was, 'We've got a little problem in the consumer bank and we need you to come fix it,'" Mack remembered. "I started trying to figure out how it needs to be fixed, what's the next smartest action we need to take."
Mack hit the road on a listening tour of her new employees, traveling "51 of the next 52 weeks," she said. "I went everywhere American Airlines flew." She met with groups of consumer bank staffers to hear what life was like in the branches.
The mission: "We had to send a strong message to employees that they were heard, and send a strong message to customers that the Wells Fargo they chose was the Wells Fargo they could count on."
Her strategy for these meetings with a hundred or more employees was to come in alone, sit on a stool at the front of the group, and then try to introduce herself as a person.
So they could understand her background, she talked about her family, including her oldest daughter, who had recently died, in 2014, at age 23 after a sudden illness. Then she relayed what she'd heard from other workers: "You're feeling like what we're saying and what we're measuring aren't the same things." She would talk about the compensation incentive plan, and ask for suggestions on how they should design it.
Righting the unit took years, and the regulatory fallout still hasn't ended. Wells Fargo continues to labor under an asset cap that's now five years old, with no signs that the government will lift the restrictions.
An exec reflects
Banking has changed for women in the last four decades, although the number of women at the apex of the industry remains ultralow, with just one female CEO, Citi's Jane Fraser, among the top 50 U.S. banks by assets.
A customer who called Mack to congratulate her when she announced her retirement related the story of when they met, at the very beginning of Mack's career: "He said, he can remember when my then-manager introduced me, and the then-manager went back into his office and said, 'I know you've probably never had a woman before, and if you're uncomfortable, I can change it.'"
It was the beginning of a career as one of the few top women in the field.
"All of my mentors were men," Mack said.
"They were great. But now you can have role models that look more like people who are joining the workforce," she added.
Looking back, Mack said, banking and wealth management turned out not to be boring after all. As the industry struggles to recruit and promote women, banks could do well to emphasize how much the jobs involve helping people: "I can't think of where I could land, except medical school or the ministry, where I could have a bigger impact on people's lives," she said.
She ticked off some highlights of how she tried to help over the years: turning around Wells Fargo's retail unit so that the people who worked there wouldn't lose their jobs; making the division work once again for the customers who had lost trust in it; working with nonprofits on credit-score repair programs.
"It's really purpose-driven," she said. "With the hesitation of categorizing people — I do think women are drawn to opportunities where they feel they can make a difference."
