Source: Chicago Tribune
by Dakin Campbell,
September 23, 2016
Tim Sloan is Wells Fargo’s president, and heir apparent to embattled CEO John Stumpf. (Wells Fargo)
The man assigned to do the messy task: Tim Sloan, the bank’s 56-year-old president, chief operating officer and trusted No. 2 to Chief Executive Officer John Stumpf. As Stumpf recounted for Congress this week, Sloan told Tolstedt that the bank would “go in a different direction.” She was soon replaced.
It was quintessential Sloan, the quiet fixer, the man called in to clean up messes or help cinch giant acquisitions. He’s also long been considered Stumpf’s likely successor, a view that’s only grown as the CEO has taken a public beating in recent days. Sloan finds himself in what analysts say is an enviable position amid the crisis. By dint of his past jobs, he can make the case that he is insulated from the taint of the current controversy.
Sloan has spent his career working with corporations and institutional investors or the finance parts of Wells Fargo — not the now-tarnished retail side, where the allegedly fraudulent consumer accounts were manufactured.
That distance should make it easier for the bank’s board to act if it decides that the 63-year-old Stumpf has to step down, said Marty Mosby, an analyst at Vining Sparks in Memphis, Tenn.
“The backdrop they have is somewhat fortunate,” Mosby said. “Tim Sloan was on the business side of the bank. He was wholesale banking, he wasn’t really retail banking. So they have a little cover.”
To be sure, Sloan’s role since November overseeing the company’s four business divisions, including the retail bank, may still leave him vulnerable to criticism. He also has sat for years on the company’s operating committee, giving him a front-row seat to top executives’ deliberations over management issues, strategy and handling risks.
Stumpf’s week keeps getting worse: On Thursday, he stepped down from the Federal Reserve’s Federal Advisory Council amid political pressure. Lawmakers also urged the Labor Department to join the list of regulators scrutinizing the bank’s misconduct. And that’s after Sen. Elizabeth Warren called for Stumpf to resign during his Senate Banking Committee testimony, adding to pressure on the CEO as the stock sinks toward its lowest level in more than two years.
Still, Mosby said he doubts Wells Fargo’s board will decide to go in that direction.
Warren Buffett, the biggest investor in Wells Fargo, has remained quiet on the controversy, and in an interview with Fox Business Network said that he won’t comment until November.
Buffett’s silence on Wells Fargo contrasts with his support of executives including Goldman Sachs’s Lloyd Blankfein and JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon when their companies drew regulatory scrutiny.
Oscar Suris, a Wells Fargo spokesman, declined to comment or make Sloan available for an interview.
Both Stumpf and Sloan are longtime employees of Wells Fargo and its predecessors. Stumpf joined in 1982, Sloan in 1987. They share a host of traits — Midwestern, deliberate, loyal — not to mention the gray hair and tanned look of a bank CEO. One difference: Sloan’s a golfer, Stumpf prefers bridge.
A former colleague describes Sloan as an everyman executive who wouldn’t be seen wearing a custom-made Italian suit, preferring an off-the-rack brand. That style carries over to his management approach.
“He is not someone you would consider a transformational CEO if this company needs to go in a new direction,” said Brian Kleinhanzl, an analyst at Keefe, Bruyette & Woods.
Sloan commutes most weeks to the bank’s headquarters in San Francisco from the eight-bedroom, 5,800-square-foot house he shares with his wife and three children in San Marino, a tony enclave in Los Angeles county.
He hasn’t been immune to controversy. In 2011 and 2012, Wells Fargo customers angry about the bank’s mortgage dealings protested at his house. He didn’t answer the door either time, according to local news reports.
Over the past decade Sloan has taken on sensitive projects for Stumpf.
In the midst of the financial crisis in 2008, he was one of two senior executives from Wells Fargo’s wholesale division to lead the examination of Wachovia Corp.’s commercial and investment bank. The analysis helped Stumpf get comfortable with the deal, a $12.7 billion transaction that propelled Wells Fargo deeper into investment banking.
In 2011, Sloan stepped into the breach to quiet concerns when Wells Fargo announced the surprise resignation of Chief Financial Officer Howard Atkins for undisclosed personal reasons.
Born in Cleveland, Sloan grew up in the Detroit area, where his father served as a longtime executive at Ford. He earned a bachelor’s degree, and then an MBA, from the University of Michigan (and remains a fan of the school’s football and basketball teams today).
After graduation, he landed his first formal job at Continental Illinois National Bank & Trust Co. in 1984, just as bad energy loans were driving the lender into what was then the largest bank collapse in U.S. history. Sloan landed in the workout group.
“Everybody should spend some time in workouts,” he told Bloomberg in 2011. “You look at other people’s mistakes, and then you learn from them.”
At Wells Fargo, in the mid-1990s he helped set up the merchant banking group, which made real estate loans, offered mezzanine debt and occasionally took equity stakes with the bank’s own money, according to a former colleague.
By 2000, he was running capital markets when the bank bought First Security Corp. and picked up a small investment banking business, according to American Banker.
He showed an eye for acquisitions. In 1999, Sloan led Wells Fargo’s purchase of Eastdil Realty. Six years later, the bank bought Secured Capital Corp. and merged the two firms, creating what has become a top U.S. real estate investment bank, Eastdil Secured.
Sloan was named chief financial officer in 2011, the year when the suspect consumer banking behavior is thought to have begun. But as CFO, where he oversaw finance, planning and the like, Sloan was removed from the retail operations.
“Though he did have a tenure as CFO when this was going on, he didn’t have business line responsibility,” said analyst Mosby.
Three years later he was named head of the bank’s wholesale banking division, which counts companies — not consumers — as clients. In that role, he was parallel to Tolstedt in the executive ranks.
In November 2015 Sloan became Tolstedt’s boss, when his new role as COO and president gave him oversight of her community banking division. By then, the investigation was well underway. Los Angeles had filed its lawsuit claiming improprieties, and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency had found shortcomings in the bank’s sales practices.
Eight months later, Tolstedt was on her way out.
