Wells Fargo 2010 Annual Report Download - page 11

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average of 36hours for every team member. We’ve added
3,000bankers in our stores the past two years and opened
47 banking stores during the last year, many in Wachovia
Community Banking states.
Regardless of the economic cycle, any successful business
must reduce cost and complexity without impairing customer
service. This means that in a company our size, jobs are being
created, changed, or eliminated every day. In 2010, we closed
our network of 638 WellsFargo Financial stores because we now
can serve those consumer and commercial finance customers
through our national network, expanded through the Wachovia
merger, of 6,314 Community Banking stores, and through
other WellsFargo businesses. In addition to our banking
stores, we also have a mortgage presence in 2,200 locations
including standalone mortgage stores and other business-
partner sites. Because “people as a competitive advantage” is
one of our primary values, we identified positions elsewhere
in our company for thousands of team members aected by
this dicult decision. We also moved other businesses and
functions that were part of WellsFargo Financial to other parts
of our company. We’re proud that by year-end, three of every
four aected team members, or 11,200, had moved into other
positions or departments with our company. That is standing
together with teammembers.
In appreciation
In April 2011, Dick McCormick retires
from our Board after 28years of service to
our company. We believe this makes him
the longest-serving Board member in our
company’s history. Dick joined the Board
of our predecessor company, Norwest Corporation, in 1983
when we were an Upper Midwest bank with $20billion in assets,
more than 900 stores, and 17,700 team members (including me,
a 29-year-old loan administrator who had joined the company
a year earlier). Dick brought to our Board not just decades
of senior leadership in the telecommunications industry, but
year after year, we benefited from his thorough, pragmatic
knowledge of our industry, markets, and businesses, his
institutional memory, and his ability to ask the tough questions
in a respectful and courteous way, with integrity, humility, and
kindness. He embodies for us the best of corporate governance.
We thank Dick and his wife, Mary Pat, for all they’ve done for
our company, and wish them and their family all thebest.
We thank all our team members for standing together with
our customers, taking the time to understand and satisfy their
financial needs, helping them create a financial plan, serving
them when, where, and how they want to be served. We thank
them for their outstanding execution to date of the WellsFargo-
Wachovia merger as we embark on the third and final year
of the integration. Recognizing their outstanding eort, our
Board approved in January 2011 a profit-sharing contribution
of 2percent of pay for all eligible team members on our U.S.
payroll into their 401(k) plans. We thank our customers for
entrusting us with even more of their business and returning
to us for their next financial services product. Beginning on
the next page, we tell you the stories of how we stand together
with our customers and our communities. And we thank you,
our owners, for your confidence in WellsFargo as we begin our
160thyear.
We’re more optimistic than ever about the future of our
company, our communities, and our country. Every decision
we make is guided by our vision—to satisfy all our customers’
financial needs and help them succeed financially—and
by our values: people, ethics, “what’s right for our customers,”
diversity, and leadership. They remain our compass, our road
map, our gyroscope. That’s the way our ancestors who raised
their families, the pioneers who built our communities, the team
members who built our company, were guided. They didn’t need
GPS, smart phones, and electronic tablets to find their way.
Their values guided them. We do this by choice, not chance.
We don’t wake up every morning having to ask ourselves which
way we’re going. We just stand with our customers, try to do
what’s right for them, and keep riding the stagecoach in the
same direction it’s been headed since1852.
When we stand together, we can thrive together.
John G. Stumpf
Chairman, President and Chief Executive Ocer