Authorities wonder if Wells Fargo’s practices made Latinos a target.
Matthew Castro says he’s sorry about what he did at Wells Fargo & Co., and even sorrier about the people he did it to: Latinos not so different from himself.
Castro, 41, says he is one of the thousands of people Wells Fargo has fired for secretly opening accounts without customers’ consent.
But for Castro, the scandal that has toppled the bank’s longtime leader, John Stumpf, cuts especially deep. He says he and colleagues seized every opportunity to open sham accounts for Latinos, many of them recent immigrants.
“There would be times the client would sit down and leave without even knowing they had these new accounts,” says Castro, whose father came to the U.S. from Colombia. He says he tried to lessen his guilt by doing volunteer work.
As Wells Fargo’s new chief executive officer, Tim Sloan, tries to contain the scandal, Los Angeles authorities, former employees and community activists are raising an uncomfortable question: Did bank employees single out Latinos, particularly those without Social Security numbers or a strong command of English, as they opened legions of unauthorized accounts?
A spokeswoman for Wells Fargo denied the San Francisco-based bank targeted anyone. And given the bank is a major player in the West and Southwest, where many Latinos live, the issue may boil down to geography.
But for Wells Fargo, the very suggestion stings. Wells has deeper roots in Hispanic communities than any other major bank and has actively courted Latinos in recent years.
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and others have long urged immigrants in general, and those from Mexico in particular, to turn away from predatory financial players and embrace mainstream banks. Even with those efforts, nearly one in five Hispanic households were unbanked as of 2013, the most recent year for which FDIC statistics are available.