Wells Fargo unveiled a new credit card and is bolstering how it rewards customers for their spending, crucial steps in Chief Executive Officer Charlie Scharf's mission to make the fourth-largest U.S. bank a bigger player in a space long dominated by rivals.
The firm is adding a $95-a-year travel-focused card to its roster this week, according to a statement Wednesday. It will also add transfer partners, including Air France-KLM, British Airways and Choice Hotels International, to its reward platform for the first time next month.
The card, called Autograph Journey, is meant to rival JPMorgan Chase's Sapphire Preferred offering and is Scharf's latest lob in his years-long effort to remake Wells Fargo's suite of products. Cardholders will earn five points per dollar spent on hotels, four points for airlines and three points for all other travel and dining.
"We were punching well below our weight relative to our retail bank," Krista Phillips, Wells Fargo's head of consumer credit cards and enterprise marketing, said in an interview. "We knew we had a great opportunity because everybody carries a credit card and we also knew that not all of our existing customers had a Wells Fargo credit card."
Scharf, the former CEO of Visa who earlier ran JPMorgan's retail arm, identified credit cards as a growth area soon after taking the reins at Wells Fargo in late 2019. He quickly hired fellow JPMorgan alum Ray Fischer to run the effort, and the firm has launched six cards in the years since, with more planned for this year.
The CEO has also repeatedly blasted his firm's old lineup: "This is one where it's just not rocket science," Scharf said in 2021. "Our product was uncompetitive," he added, citing rewards, customer service and credit lines as examples of where the company has fallen short.
The firm is "heavily" weighing whether to add an even pricier card to its roster to rival the likes of JPMorgan's Chase Sapphire Reserve and American Express's Platinum offering, Phillips said.
Spending on Wells Fargo's credit cards amounted to $136.4 billion last year. While that was up 15% from 2022, it was still just a fraction of the $1.16 trillion in credit-card volume that JPMorgan reported for the same period.
