Wells Fargo to refund fees for delays that were its fault

Wells Fargo & Co. said Wednesday that it will refund fees it assessed to mortgage borrowers whose delays in completing their loan applications were primarily the bank’s fault.

As it looks to win back trust after a scandal over its sales practices, the San Francisco bank said it will reach out to customers who paid rate-lock extension fees from Sept. 16, 2013, through Feb. 28, 2017, and give refunds to customers who don’t think they should have paid.

The fees are supposed to only be charged when borrowers fail to finish their paperwork on time and want to retain the initially quoted interest rate on their home loan.

The bank said that roughly $98 million in extension fees were assessed to about 110,000 borrowers during that period, but it thinks a substantial number of the fees were appropriately charged. The bank said the amount to be refunded probably will be lower, as not all of the fees assessed were actually paid and some fees already have been refunded.

In July, a former Wells Fargo mortgage banker filed a wrongful-termination lawsuit, alleging that the bank falsified records so it could blame mortgage-processing holdups on borrowers — and that it fired him for trying to report the practice.

The mortgage fee matter also has been the subject of a classaction lawsuit, and the bank reported in August that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau also is investigating the matter. Wells Fargo has acknowledged that the controversy was a factor in a shakeup of bank’s mortgage division.

Rate-lock fees can be significant, typically ranging from 0.125 percent to 0.25 percent of the total amount of a mortgage, depending on the size of the loan and other factors. For a home buyer looking to borrow $400,000, a 0.25 percent fee is $1,000.

Wells Fargo is by far the nation’s largest mortgage lender, originating $244 billion in home loans last year, or about 12 percent of all U.S. mortgages.

The bank said Wednesday that an internal review “determined a rate-lock extension policy implemented in September 2013 was, at times, not consistently applied, resulting in some borrowers being charged fees in cases where the company was primarily responsible for the delays that made the extensions necessary.”

As of March 1 of this year, the bank said, a centralized review team is making sure the policy is applied consistently. The refunds will start to go out this quarter, it said.

Also Wednesday, Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation, developed in the wake of the scandal over millions of fake accounts created by Wells Fargo, that would free consumers from arbitration agreements with banks in the event that the bank establishes a false contract using a customer’s personal information, without that customer’s consent.