Well, we do know this about Wells Fargo & Co.: the bank is a making “a lot of investment in technology.”
That’s about the extent of the disclosure.
Yesterday, Wells Fargo released its fourth quarter 2013 earnings. (For those of you who missed it, Wells turned in 2013 net income of $21.9 billion, up 16% from 2012, and quarterly net income of $5.6 billion, 10% higher on a year-over-year basis.) The release offered zero details on the bank’s technology spending or innovation performance.
However, John Stumpf, Wells’s chairman, president, chief executive officer and “banker of the year,” was asked during the bank’s quarterly earnings call yesterday, “…what are your plans for the branch network given the growth in mobile banking and your recent piloted the neighborhood stores?”
Stumpf answered that Wells is “making a lot of investments in technology as customers are interested in mobile and in other ways to access us.” But he reiterated that Wells “still believe that stores are important and we believe that because our customers tell us that, and we do have that pilot that you mentioned and we are assessing that, looking at that.”
Expect Wells’s branch network, which numbered 9,051 last month, to grow in 2014.
“I don’t think there will be a significant net increase because sometimes we build a new one and we consolidate one or two into that, but most of the investments we are going to be making will be in areas like product and convenience for customers,” Stumpf said.
That’s it for details. Wells doesn’t offer specifics on its technology spend. In fact, it is impossible to even determine from its earnings report within which of the reported 19 non-interest expense categories technology falls. We do know that as of last month Wells had 11.5 million mobile banking users, and that was up 20% from the previous year. I guess we should call that total “a lot,” too.