Bad Systems Will Cause You to Lose Sight of Customers' Best Interests – Financial Services Edition

**SPEAKER_1** (0:04)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection, and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:18)
Hello, and welcome back to the show. We're going to dive into scandal today when business does bad. I'm Stephen Sakach here with Tullio Siragusa, Ash Maher. Hey guys, this is going to be a fun one. Some of history's greatest tragedies we know have been rightfully blamed on bad systems. The madness of bureaucracy, the lethal genocide machines, corruption. We're at a time in our history right now when our systems are being tested like never before. We're going to cover some themes on systems coming up here, bad systems, how they went sideways. Different industries and different goals.
We're going to pull out some different trends. Often when you think of business scandal, you think of, hey, maybe a few bad people involved in this, a couple of bad apples, but sometimes it's something where thousands of people that are this cogs in this bad machine just get caught up with it, and it goes on for a very long time. Obviously, with some of this, the sole focus is dollars in pockets for people, but it can create a win-lose scenario, not a win-win scenario or not a win-six like in the conscious capitalism where you're talking about customers, employees, investors, vendors, etc.
I think we'll see a lot of this is chasing that dollar at all cost.
We're going to dive into financial services today. Now, this might sound a little dry to people, but this has caused some serious problems, recessions and scandals and all sorts of craziness. Let's start with a recent one. I mentioned I wanted to talk about Wells Fargo. Ash, do you remember the old Wells Fargo commercial?

**Ash Maher** (2:07)
I don't, but I do remember the scandal.

**Stephen Sakach** (2:10)
That's perfect. There's the younger generation right there. Tullio, do you remember the old Wells Fargo commercials?

**Tullio Siragusa** (2:19)
I do with the stagecoach wagon.
I don't remember the actual wording or the copy of the commercial, but I remember the feeling. It was a feeling of trust and stability. There was an enterprising feeling about it, almost like, hey, we were there from the beginning. We helped build this country. I think that was actually some of the wording. We helped build this country.

**Stephen Sakach** (2:45)
This old-timey stagecoach, we've been there a long time. We trusted with your money for a long time.
That was us growing up. That was the feeling we had with Wells Fargo. We see these commercials, that was the brand.

**Tullio Siragusa** (3:00)
It worked because I became a Wells Fargo customer as a result of that. I just felt like this is the guys I trust.
Yes.

**Stephen Sakach** (3:07)
Then what happened to you, Tullio?

**Tullio Siragusa** (3:11)
Then I jumped off that wagon pretty quickly after.

**Stephen Sakach** (3:15)
You jumped off that stagecoach.

**Tullio Siragusa** (3:16)
I found a few extra accounts on my portfolio that I hadn't opened. I'm like, what's going on here? Then the whole scandal with all the overly aggressive sales branches just selling stuff that nobody even bought. Now, I was like, yeah, I don't think I trust these guys that much now.
Exited it.

**Stephen Sakach** (3:41)
I'll do a recap of this. Yeah, but basically, the scandal involved sales.
It was like, yeah, you've got the carrot in front of the stagecoach with that, but you also got the guy whipping behind there. That's really what's going on here is a lot of that very aggressively within Wells Fargo. So in front of Congress, the CEO at the time acknowledged wrongful sales practice behavior and says it goes against everything regarding our core principles, our ethics, and our culture. When he said that, employees were like, does it? The reality within Wells Fargo, it was just a different story. So there was intense pressure to meet sales quotas, created an environment where just unethical practices flourished. So former employees described the unbearable pressure to meet sales target. One employee recounted in an NPR interview, the expectation to sell at least eight products a day, with targets sometime reaching 20 during their jump into January, so two probably caught up and jumped into January promotion.
They gave you a couple of...

**Tullio Siragusa** (4:54)
This is a real boiler room they were running.

**Stephen Sakach** (4:57)
Yeah, but so the pressure led to this toxic work environment. Some called it a grind house or soul crushing, and what really the other side of this, the whipping part of this is there was extreme coaching sessions designed as one-on-ones where managers would pressure employees to meet their targets under the threat of not being labeled a team player or ultimately fired. An employee described being marched into a conference room locked inside and forced to sign formal warnings about their sales performance. So, to fight multiple calls to their own ethics hotlines, you know, the environment didn't improve in this employee that called the ethics hotline was fired, but, so there's so many things going on here, and it's happening actually for years and years, and leadership failed to act on these many, many whistleblower complaints within their system.