Wells Fargo CEO Blames "Limited Pool of Black Talent" For Lack Of Diversity

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Wells Fargo is one of the biggest banks in America and for some reason, it can’t seem to keep their brand out of bad situations that earn them negative press.

Last year, they experienced a massive outage that left millions stuck looking crazy all over the world when they tried to spend their own money. They’ve also had to pay settlements for charging Black and Latino customers more for mortgages and loans while having separate legal trouble for opening accounts in customers’ names without them knowing. All of that is just from the corporate level, but when it comes to in-branch hourly employees, they’ve got workers stealing out of their vault and others stealing over $320,000 from non-English speaking customers over the course of the last 5 years.

They say, in business, the problems and culture start from the top-down, and yesterday, their CEO proved that idea to be correct. On a Zoom meeting, CEO Charles Scharf was explaining why the company can’t seem to meet its diversity goals and gave the most racist and ignorant response possible.

“While it might sound like an excuse, the unfortunate reality is that there is a very limited pool of Black talent to recruit from,” Scharf said in a memo per Reuters.

To make matters worse, it was also revealed he has used this excuse before in a company-wide email sent on June 18th. Wells Fargo is also one of the main companies that announced new diversity initiatives during the protests earlier this summer over the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Just as we thought, it was all performative with no intent to fix the broken system that harms Black and brown people. Of course, like always, they issued a half-azzed apology, which you can view below.