Wells Fargo CEO: Bank in growth mode and Arizona is a key market

Editor’s note: This story was originally published in the Phoenix Business Journal on October 19, 2026.

After years of regulatory restrictions on its balance sheet, Wells Fargo & Co. is in growth mode with Arizona serving as a key market for the San Francisco-based financial giant, the bank’s top executive told the Business Journal.

Last year, the U.S. Federal Reserve lifted a $1.95 trillion asset cap that was imposed on Wells Fargo (NYSE: WFC) in 2018 after the bank’s high-profile compliance issues surfaced. Since then, the bank is seeing significant growth in deposits and loans, driven in part by new credit card accounts, auto loan originations and commercial lending activity.

Wells Fargo reported average loans of $1 trillion and average deposits of $1.5 trillion (PDF) during the third quarter, both representing an 11% increase over the prior year quarter.

What’s more, the financial services giant’s banking arm, Wells Fargo Bank NA, opened 660,000 new credit card accounts in the third quarter and reported that consumer and corporate customers remain resilient despite headwinds from inflation and interest rates.

The bank is investing in technology, including a proprietary blockchain for tokenized deposits and new AI-powered tools for financial advisors to improve operational efficiency. It’s also expanding its commercial banking and wealth management segments and added more than 130 new business bankers over the past year, Wells Fargo CEO Charlie Scharf said on the bank’s Oct. 13 earnings call.

In Arizona, Wells Fargo aims to expand its presence through customer relationships, local community engagement and investment across its banking businesses, Scharf told the Business Journal in an exclusive interview during a visit to the company’s Chandler corporate campus earlier this month.

“Arizona is very important to us. It has been important to us for a long time,” Scharf said. “We’ve got a significant presence here, both in terms of the business that we have in our branches, but also our commercial bankers who we serve customers.”

Wells Fargo is the third-largest bank in Arizona with $39.3 billion in deposits and a 16.9% market share in the state, according to recent data from the Federal Insurance Deposit Corp. The bank operates 153 offices and branches in Arizona.

Wells Fargo is the fourth-largest bank operating in Maricopa County, with $28.1 billion in countywide deposits and a 14.9% market share. The bank employs more than 11,500 people in the Valley, some 9,000 of whom work at its corporate campus in Chandler.

Phoenix and Arizona are important growth markets because of population growth and strong demand for financial services, Scharf said.

“We want to grow in places with growing populations and that’s what the Phoenix area is,” he said. “I’ve been at the company six years, and so I would say I inherited a lot of really wonderful characteristics. One of the characteristics is that we bring all the benefits of a big bank, but we try and be very community-oriented. When you walk into a bank branch, the people who work in that bank branch will know you. They know your family. And that matters to us.”

Well, two things, quite frankly. Number one is we want to grow our customer base. We lived with constraints for a period of time that are now behind us, so we can compete on a level playing field. We find — as we serve customers — that we’re an attractive alternative for people. The second thing is, broadly speaking, it’s a very good economic environment. There are a lot of concerns that people have. Consumer confidence shows those concerns, but when you look at how consumers and businesses are behaving with their spending and their borrowing, they’re still in relatively strong financial shape.

We’ve had the opportunity to go through and look at all of our businesses. Our consumer banking and lending businesses, our commercial banking business, our wealth management business, and our corporate investment and banking business all have opportunities to grow here and that’s what we’re seeing when we actually look at our results.

We’re investing in products and customer service, and adding coverage people across all of our businesses. We’ve added commercial banking relationship managers. We’re adding wealth advisers in our bank branches. We’re adding small business bankers. When you think about the semiconductor companies (in Arizona), we’ve added significant resources in our corporate investment bank over the last several years to serve that population, and what you see in our results is growth across all of those different businesses because of the resources that we’re adding.

AI is one of the most exciting opportunities. But at the same time, it’s one that we feel we’ve got to be incredibly careful how we use. Having a machine with the ability to do a bunch of work and ultimately draw a conclusion on one hand is incredibly powerful. On the other hand, it’s incredibly risky, and we understand that what we do is we provide safety and security for customers we do business with, and that’s paramount.

So we’re constantly looking at ways to use these tools to help us do a better job for our customers and for each other without sacrificing any of that safety and security. I would describe it as we’re very excited, but we’re also very, very cautious about what we are going to allow and when we’re going to allow it.

I would say first we’re reorienting what our workforce looks like, and the workforce that made sense 10 years ago doesn’t make sense today with the tools that are available and the business opportunities.

We’re also spending a lot of time figuring out where in the country we want to have strategic locations, of which Phoenix is a very important one. So as we think about what that population base looks like, we do have a lot of attrition across the country. As we have that attrition, it also gives us the opportunity to say, ‘What are the skills that we need today?’

We’re putting a lot more of our resources directly into people that can sit in front of consumers or businesses and help them. But we’re also hiring young people and entry-level people. I just did an event right next door with 75 people from our analyst population that we’re putting through a training program. It puts them in a position to grow with the company.

For many years, we haven’t added bank branches. We’re just starting now to add branches, and I would assume at some point that Phoenix and Arizona will be included in those plans.

We’d always consider it. We think about all of our options, but we don’t feel the need to make an acquisition because we feel like we have an incredible market position here in Arizona to build from. We think we have all the products. We think we’ve got the scale that we need. So when you have those things — it’s not that we wouldn’t look at something — but we think we’ve got a position to grow from.