Wells Fargo Wealth Head Carroll to Leave, Succeeded by Weiss

(Bloomberg) -- Wells Fargo & Co.'s David Carroll, who oversees wealth and investment management and was among senior executives who had pay clawed back as the lender faced scrutiny over creating fake customer accounts, is stepping down after almost 38 years at the company.

Jonathan Weiss, the current head of Wells Fargo Securities, will succeed Carroll and join the bank's operating committee, the San Francisco-based company said Thursday in a statement. Carroll, 60, will stay in his role until July 1. The lender plans to name a replacement for Weiss next week, a person familiar with the plans said, asking not to be identified discussing personnel matters.

“Under David's leadership, the performance of our wealth-management business has been pretty impressive,” Chief Executive Officer Tim Sloan said at an investor conference in New York. “He's had just an incredible career at the company.”

Wells Fargo's board this year withheld some 2016 pay and clawed back some 2014 pay for Carroll and seven other senior executives as it sought to hold managers accountable for the bank's bogus-account scandal. Carroll received $9.2 million in 2016, according to the company's proxy statement. 

Carroll will leave Wells Fargo with a package worth about $23.6 million as of Wednesday's close, according to regulatory filings. Of that amount, $2.12 million comes from a pension plan and deferred compensation, with the remainder from outstanding stock awards that have yet to vest. How much he'll ultimately reap from those depends on the bank's performance and stock price.

Quarterly Profit

Wealth and investment management, the smallest of Wells Fargo's three main divisions, posted profit of $623 million in the first quarter, a 22 percent increase from a year earlier. The unit, which houses the brokerage business, private bank and asset-management operations, increased earnings 4.8 percent in 2016 to $2.4 billion.

Carroll came to Wells Fargo after the lender acquired North Carolina-based Wachovia Corp. in 2009. From 2005 until the merger with Wells Fargo, he was head of Wachovia's capital management group, which included the retail brokerage, the bank said. He started at Wachovia in 1979.

Weiss, who joined Wachovia in 2005 from JPMorgan Chase & Co., currently oversees about 5,000 investment-bank employees in more than 40 offices across North America, Europe and Asia, according to the statement. Based in New York, he'll report to Sloan in the new position.

--With assistance from Steve Dickson and Anders Melin

To contact the reporter on this story: Laura J. Keller in New York at lkeller22@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Peter Eichenbaum at peichenbaum@bloomberg.net, Steven Crabill, Dan Kraut