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"Doug [Braunstein] is a world-class banker," Wells Fargo CEO Charlie Scharf said in announcing his hire as vice chairman. "Expertise and business relationships reflect our continued commitment to strengthen" the corporate and investment banking division.
Wells Fargo CEO Charlie Scharf has added another heavyweight from his JPMorgan Chase days to his leadership team.
Doug Braunstein, a veteran investment banker and former top JPMorgan executive, is joining the $1.9 trillion-asset Wells Fargo on Wednesday as vice chairman. The hire comes as Wells Fargo continues its effort to turn around its once lackluster investment banking operations, a priority for Scharf as he looks to make the bank a bigger dealmaker.
"Doug is a world-class banker," Scharf said in a news release, saying his "expertise and business relationships reflect our continued commitment to strengthen" Wells Fargo's corporate and investment banking division.
Braunstein will report to Scharf.
The two were top lieutenants of Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan, where Braunstein held key investment banking roles before becoming chief financial officer and vice chairman. Scharf ran JPMorgan's retail bank before becoming CEO of Visa and later CEO of the Bank of New York Mellon.
The San Francisco bank says it has made more than 50 senior hires in its corporate and investment bank, which is focused on landing headline-grabbing deals as well as smaller middle-market ones.
Wells Fargo's investment bank still lags heavyweights such as JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, but has been steadily climbing the rankings. So far this year, Wells Fargo ranks sixth in U.S. merger and acquisition deals by volume, according to a scorecard from Dealogic and The Wall Street Journal.
"We're starting to see some green shoots — a bunch of deals that we wouldn't have been part of in the past, some activity levels increasing quite a bit," Michael Santomassimo, Wells Fargo's CFO, said at a UBS investor conference Monday.
The team is led by another former JPMorgan banker, Jonathan Weiss, who was part of Wachovia Corp. before Wells Fargo acquired the company and its investment bank in 2008. After Weiss did a stint in Wells Fargo's wealth management division, Scharf tapped him to run the corporate and investment bank.
Braunstein, who spent nearly two decades at JPMorgan, also brings some experience advising company boards and CEOs on financing issues and strategic alternatives. The bank says he's been involved in almost $1 trillion in transactions over his career. He has served on boards of companies such as Cantaloupe, Cardtronics, Eagle Pharmaceuticals and Talkspace.
In the news release, he said the bank is "uniquely positioned in financial services to build and broaden their client-serving lines of business." He also said Wells Fargo has "made a tremendous amount of progress across multiple dimensions over the past five years," since Scharf joined the bank.
Wells Fargo is still under an unprecedented asset cap that the Federal Reserve imposed six years ago, a response to a series of consumer abuse scandals involving the bank. But Wells has made progress in freeing itself from a handful of other consent orders with regulators, which analysts say is a sign that Scharf's compliance overhauls are working. This year, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency freed Wells Fargo from a 2016 consent order tied to its sales practices.
Braunstein's experience will make him an "effective advisor to Wells Fargo's senior management team on business issues beyond client development," Scharf said.
Scharf had previously hired Thomas Nides, a former Morgan Stanley executive and U.S. ambassador to Israel, to become the bank's vice chairman. But Nides left the company weeks after, saying the war between Israel and Hamas gave him "an obligation to turn my attention back to the region."
The North Carolina-based bank rolled out a multiyear program to provide loans, investments and philanthropic support to communities in the western part of the state.
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Director Rohit Chopra said the FICO credit-scoring model has drawbacks in price, predictiveness and market competition, and stakeholders should develop a more open-sourced model that uses artificial intelligence.
Analysts say lenders' shares could rally on deregulation, lighter tax burdens and a resurgence of M&A. Declining interest rates and lower loan losses could further bolster bottom lines and attract investor interest.
The contract gives the nation's oldest bank access to more than $3 billion in deposits a month. Comerica, the current administrator, has received a three-year extension of service to help with the transfer.
