Cross-selling wasn’t a bad idea. It started as one of the smartest strategies in modern banking.
Under CEO Richard Kovacevich, Wells Fargo built its cross-selling strategy on a simple insight: sell a customer more products, and you learn more about what they actually need, which lets you build better products for them. Relationship first, revenue as the natural result. It worked, for years, and it made Wells Fargo one of the most respected banks in the country.
Then it curdled. By the time John Stumpf took over as CEO, cross-selling had stopped being a relationship strategy and become a number — 6.11 products per customer, more than double the industry average, and something Stumpf openly bragged about to shareholders as proof that Wells Fargo was “the king of cross-sell.” Carrie Tolstedt, who ran the bank’s entire retail network — over 6,000 branches, more than 100,000 employees — turned that number into a campaign called “Going for Gr-eight”: eight products, non-negotiable, every branch, every day.
Nobody along the way asked why cross-selling had worked in the first place. They just knew it should keep going up.
It couldn’t. The target was mathematically closer to impossible than aggressive, and the pressure to hit it anyway pushed an ordinarily ethical workforce toward increasingly desperate shortcuts. Employees opened accounts customers never asked for. Some created fake email addresses so customers wouldn’t notice the new cards arriving. Between 2011 and 2016, Wells Fargo fired more than 5,300 employees for exactly this kind of behavior.
Leadership never once revisited the target itself. They rolled out ethics training. They introduced a “Quality of Sale” scorecard. They treated every fired employee as a bad apple — lazy, dishonest, lacking the grit to hit a reasonable goal — rather than asking whether the goal itself had stopped being reasonable a long time ago.
From where Tolstedt and Stumpf sat, that reading made sense. Disciplined execution means no excuses. When people started cracking under the pressure, the obvious read wasn’t “the target is broken.” It was “some of our people are weak.” Firing them and moving forward felt like accountability. It let leadership wash their hands of the problem and keep walking the same road toward disaster.
I feel for everyone caught in this, honestly, more than the “greedy bankers” version of this story usually allows. Stumpf was chasing numbers that would make shareholders happy. Tolstedt was executing a mandate that wasn’t hers to question, trying to please the people above her. The 5,300 employees who got fired were mostly just trying to survive a high-pressure job without public humiliation. Nobody in that chain set out to build a fraud machine.
On September 8, 2016, regulators fined Wells Fargo $185 million after uncovering roughly two million unauthorized accounts and credit cards. Stumpf resigned the following month.
Underneath the targets and the fraud, this story is really about fear. Stumpf’s fear of disappointing shareholders. Tolstedt’s fear of disappointing Stumpf. Every front-line employee’s fear of public humiliation for missing a number that was never actually achievable. Nobody in that chain felt safe enough to say the one true thing that might have stopped all of it: the target itself is the problem, not the people trying to hit it.