The eight-product goal that produced 3.5 million fake accounts
Wells Fargo's cross-sell target sounded like ambition. Employees who couldn't hit it made the numbers up instead.
In the 1990s, Wells Fargo executive Richard Kovacevich pushed a simple metric onto branch employees: sell each customer eight financial products — checking, savings, a credit card, a mortgage, whatever else could be bundled in. The internal name for the push was cheerful, almost jokey: Going for Gr-Eight.
The number stuck around for two decades and calcified into a quota, tracked daily, sometimes hourly, per employee. By the mid-2010s branch staff described sales goals that outside investigators later called mathematically impossible to meet through normal selling. Employees who missed them faced discipline; employees who complained that the targets made no sense were told to find a way.
Some found one. Bankers opened checking and savings accounts customers never asked for, reset PINs to hide the activity from account holders, and enrolled people — in a few documented cases, homeless clients with no reasonable use for the products — in accounts that generated fees. Regulators eventually counted more than 3.5 million unauthorized accounts opened between 2011 and 2016. The bank fired roughly 5,300 employees for it, then insisted for years that the problem was a sales-practices issue, not a culture one.
A target only measures the behavior it can see. Everything a target can't see, it quietly assigns someone else to invent.