Entry Details

About the Entry

Category: 
Online > Web Feature Series > Northeast

Title of entry: 
Alarm bells, arrogance and the crisis at Wells Fargo

Issue or Publication date:
1/31/2023, 2/1/2023, 2/2/2023, 2/3/2023, 2/6/2023

Publication name: 
American Banker

Publishing/parent company: 
Arizent

View Website home page:
https://www.americanbanker.com/

Description of the enterprising work that went into this entry and its significance or impact on readers:

"Alarm bells, arrogance and the crisis at Wells Fargo" featured interviews with the first high-level insider to speak publicly about the bank’s phony-accounts fiasco. Michael Bacon, Wells Fargo’s former chief security officer, provided jarring new insights about the scandal. He brought readers into the corporate boardroom in the years before the scandal exploded, explaining how high-level executives missed chance after chance to stave off disaster.

The interviews with Bacon, who was a key government witness in cases against other former Wells executives, took more than two years to arrange. He eventually sat for around 30 interviews over the course of roughly nine months. The series — and an accompanying podcast episode — grew out of those interviews.

But the reporting process was more complicated than just using the interviews to tell Bacon’s story. We tested Bacon’s account against an extensive documentary record, including many contemporaneous emails that came from other people. Ultimately, the documents not only supported Bacon’s claims; they made the series much more vivid, because we were able to intersperse Bacon’s recollections with details that were put in writing at the time.

This series is an example of the payoff that can come from chasing the same story for years. Several of the chapters were among our most-read stories in 2022. They provided our readers with what is, to date, the most definitive account of the biggest U.S. banking scandal of the last decade.

Links to entry URLs

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Entry URL(s), if applicable:
Please enter a URL that will direct judges to the entry: 
https://www.americanbanker.com/news/former-wells-fargo-executive-who-departed-amid-fake-account-scandal-speaks-out
Additional URLs, if needed:
https://www.americanbanker.com/news/why-wells-fargos-fake-accounts-problem-festered-for-so-long
https://www.americanbanker.com/news/wells-fargo-had-a-panel-to-address-misconduct-but-it-stopped-meeting
https://www.americanbanker.com/news/after-fake-accounts-drew-notice-wells-fargo-focused-on-damage-control
https://www.americanbanker.com/news/eyewitness-to-wells-fargo-scandal-makes-long-legal-trek

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