72 FORTUNE FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021
meaningful cultural change. “It takes a long time to turn
around such a big ship,” says Jason Goldberg, a senior
equity research analyst at Barclays. “He’s learning that.”
Scharf, for his part, sees a chance to restore the bank to
its rightful place. “I came in with a clear understanding
that the core franchise continued to be this great oppor-
tunity,” he says, “but that there was a tremendous amount
of work to do.”Scharf grew up in Westfield, N.J., a New York
suburb crowded with financial professionals like his fa-
ther, a stockbroker. By age 13, Charlie was working back-
office jobs at Manhattan brokerages. As an undergrad at
Johns Hopkins, he initially had designs on becoming a re-
search chemist—until he had a sophomore-year epiphany.
“I was in physical chemistry, locked in a lab, when I said
to myself, ‘I really don’t want to spend my life in a place
without windows,’ ” he recalls. In business, he realized,
“you could create something in a very different way.”
As fate would have it, a relative of Scharf ’s knew the
father of a banker named Jamie Dimon, the young chief
financial officer of Baltimore-based lender Commercial
Credit. Dimon brought the recent grad on board in 1987—
the start of a working relationship that would span more
than 20 years. Scharf played a variety of roles under Dimon
and Sandy Weill as they grew Commercial Credit into what
eventually became Citigroup. When Dimon landed the top
job at Bank One in 2000, he tapped Scharf as CFO. After
Bank One merged with JPMorgan Chase in 2004, Scharf
took the helm of Chase’s sprawling retail banking business.
Dimon recalls Scharf as able to “handle just about any-
thing” Dimon threw at him: “He got stuff done; he had a
good nose for cracking through the bull.” Scharf acquired
the seasoning that came with ever-larger roles; he also saw
Dimon’s job evolve as he led ever-larger companies. Of
what he learned from Dimon as a leader, Scharf says, “He
stands in front. He doesn’t hide behind people. He doesn’t
look at others when something goes wrong.”
Scharf would put those lessons into practice in 2012,
when Visa tapped him as CEO. Visa was still grappling with
its 2008 transition from a private entity, owned by an asso-
ciation of card-issuing banks, to a publicly traded company.
At Visa’s San Francisco headquarters, Scharf found what he
describes as an “insular” business that “didn’t really engage
with the technology community.” He aimed to rectify that,
establishing relationships with fintechs like PayPal and
Stripe that expanded Visa’s footprint in digital payments—
a focus that proved prescient. Says current Visa president
Ryan McInerney, a JPMorgan alum who followed Scharf to
Visa: “A lot of the foundation he laid, especially as it relates
to digital commerce, you’re seeing the results now.”
Scharf left Visa in 2016, seeking to be closer to his
family on the East Coast—and leaving behind a company
whose share price more than doubled during his tenure.up lending volume or attracting capital reserves—the
asset cap prevents it. Wells Fargo’s revenue has steadily
declined since 2017 and dropped another 15% in fiscal
2020, to $72.3 billion. Profits have shriveled, too, and
its shares, which fell 44% last year, have consistently un-
derperformed those of other big banks since the scandal
erupted. “This company is a damaged company, and all
strategies have to be put on the table to bring it back to
a level of profitability that investors will find acceptable,”
says Gerard Cassidy, head of U.S. bank equity strategy at
RBC Capital Markets.
When he took the gig, Scharf, now 55, stepped into one
of the most closely scrutinized positions in finance. It’s
his third CEO stint at a Fortune 500 financial services
company, and an extremely well-compensated one. He can
earn up to $23 million annually, depending on stock in-
centives. It also ranks among the toughest chief executive
jobs in America. Given Wells’ status as one of the biggest
“Main Street” lenders, its overall health has implications
for the broader economy too. Scharf ’s longtime mentor,
JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, tells Fortune that
the task Scharf signed up for is a challenge “too big to
walk away from,” adding, “It’s better for the country and
for the banking industry that they succeed.”
For now, Scharf is concentrating on creating a leaner,
more focused institution—shrinking the bank in order
to save it. If he succeeds in shepherding Wells Fargo out
of regulatory purgatory, he may restore the luster of one
of the grand old names of American banking. Should he
fail, Wells could be permanently relegated to afterthought
status among its blue-chip rivals.
Fortune spoke with Scharf and top Wells Fargo execu-
tives—as well as analysts, critics, industry rivals, and
former colleagues of Scharf ’s—to capture the state of
the turnaround, some 15 months into the CEO’s tenure.
It has been an eventful time that has featured sweeping
organizational changes—along with high-profile missteps
that fueled skepticism about whether Scharf can institute
6,400POSITIONS ELIMINATED IN Q4 2020With more than 260,000 employees, Wells Fargo has
one of the nation’s biggest workforces. More job
cuts are likely, however, as the bank repositions itself.WHAT COMES NEXT : CAN ANYONE FIX WELLS FARGO?