Wells Fargo fully sheds Fed’s massive 2018 enforcement order

Key insight: Wells Fargo, which once faced more than a dozen regulatory orders, is now down to a single remaining public enforcement action.What’s at stake: Six years into CEO Charlie Scharf’s tenure as CEO, Wells is moving on from its wide-ranging compliance problems.Forward look: The bank has outlined plans to grow across different lines of business that had been hamstrung by parts of the Fed’s order.

UPDATE: This story includes additional context on Wells Fargo’s past regulatory problems as well as commentary from analysts.

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Wells Fargo has finally fully shed the regulatory order that held back its growth for more than seven years.

When the Federal Reserve lifted Wells’ asset cap last June, it left in place another part of the monumental enforcement action it had imposed in 2018.

On Thursday, the Fed announced the termination of the rest of the order, saying that the bank has met requirements for governance and risk-management remediation, including two third-party reviews.

“This remediation work spanned nearly a decade,” the Fed said in a written statement.

Wells Fargo confirmed the order’s termination in a press release, but declined to comment further.

Nine months ago, when the Fed gave Wells permission to grow above $1.95 trillion of assets, CEO Charlie Scharf said the asset cap’s removal was “a pivotal milestone in our journey.” He added that the bank was “a different and far stronger company today because of the work we’ve done.”

But Fed Gov. Michael Barr said at the time that while the bank had made noticeable improvements, it still had more work to do.

The Fed’s eight-year-old order pointed to “widespread consumer abuses and other compliance breakdowns.” The central bank initially said the order would remain in place until Wells “sufficiently improves its governance and controls.”

The unprecedented order, which spurred the ouster of four Wells Fargo board members,

stemmed largely from revelations that Wells employees opened significant numbers of credit card and checking accounts without customers’ permission, spurred by quotas determined by management.

The bank has paid upwards of $5 billion in penalties, including customer settlements and redress, in connection with the unauthorized-accounts scandal.

The Fed’s announcement Thursday ends the regulatory fallout from the saga. Last year, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency settled three enforcement cases against former Wells executives for $150,000 in total, or less than 1% of the $18.5 million that the agency had previously sought.

On Thursday, Vivek Juneja, an analyst at JPMorgan Securities, wrote in a note to clients that the order’s termination was an unsurprising, “positive milestone.”

“This should reduce expenses … both lawyers and consultants plus Wells Fargo’s own employee time, and free up management attention related to managing this,” Juneja said.

With the Fed’s announcement Thursday, Wells has exited all 12 of the enforcement actions that it racked up in the 2010s.

Most of those exits have come since the start of the second Trump administration. Last year, Wells broke free from seven enforcement actions in less than five months, in addition to shedding the asset cap.

Shortly after the asset cap was removed, Wells Chief Financial Officer Michael Santomassimo said that the bank had stronger growth prospects, including an opportunity to expand its branch network, but the end of the cap wouldn’t be a “light-switch moment.” By the end of the fourth quarter, Wells’ asset size had grown to $2.08 trillion.

Scharf made $40 million in 2025, a figure that partly represented the company’s board of directors’ recognition that he oversaw its emergence from the 2018 enforcement action.

The San Francisco-headquartered firm reported net income of $21.3 billion last year, up 7% from 2024.

The company’s stock price has risen about 10% since it got over the asset cap hump last June, but it was down 2% on Thursday. The KBW Nasdaq Bank Index is up more than 23% since June 2025, and was also down about 2% on Thursday.

Piper Sandler analyst Scott Siefers wrote in a note Thursday that the market has largely moved past the regulatory actions against Wells, and is instead focused on other parts of the bank’s performance.

“We believe the shares have been treated too harshly, and we find them a good value” Siefers wrote, adding that Wells Fargo “continues its pivot to offense.”

Wells does still have one last regulatory hurdle to clear, but it’s more recent than the others.

In September 2024, the bank entered into a formal agreement with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency in connection with what the OCC characterized as “deficiencies” in Wells’ anti-money-laundering controls.

The OCC said at the time that the bank needed to make changes to its suspicious activity reporting protocols, along with enhancements to its customer due diligence and customer identification practices.