In the wake of the enforcement action against Wells Fargo for fraudulent sales practices, two of its competitors were asked about their sales practices as they announced quarterly earnings.
JPMorgan Chase Chief Financial Officer Marianne Lake said on a conference call with journalists that the bank is conducting a “deep dive” into its sales practices, according to a Bloomberg report.
“We will occasionally find issues,” she said, according to the report. “The important thing is we are focused on finding them. We’re not seeing anything rising to the level where we would be concerned.”
She repeated some of those ideas on a conference call with analysts when asked about the bank’s sales practices, in light of the Wells Fargo actions.
“So, I might just give for context, remind you or maybe you recall that for a number of years now for a fairly long time, we’ve been standing up at Investor Day and other venues saying that customer experience is the central tenant for how we think about engaging with all of our clients but certainly our retail clients in the branches,” she said, according to transcripts of the call from Seeking Alpha. “And we’ve been very, very focused on investing in customer experience broadly defined and have made great progress I think in doing that.”
The difference, Lake said, is that the bank is looking to increase customer balances with the bank rather than volume of different products.
“We had talked about the fact that what we are looking for very, very clearly is deep customer relationship engaged customers who want to be primary bank, we want to gather a deeper share of wallet, so balances not necessarily products. And so again, remember saying cross-sell is an outcome, it’s not an objective,” she said, according to the Seeking Alpha transcript. “And that’s certainly the philosophy with which we have designed our compensation and performance structures for the branches. And we review them regularly, at least annually to make sure that they continue to be aligned with our objectives and again objectives about the engaged relationship with customers, good customer experience in the right product, all the right reasons the right way.
Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan was asked about his company’s practices on a conference call with analysts, and whether analysts should expect to hear similar problems from Bank of America that Wells Fargo encountered.
“We run our consumer business consistent with responsible growth for the company,” Moynihan said. “What that means is if you focus on deepening relationships, what we call stair step, where it’s the core deposit account, the core credit card and getting it used, and the core mortgage and the core home equity and the core auto loans. That’s what we drive at and continue to drive at. That’s the backbone of what we did and how we repositioned this company over many years.”