Many of my criticisms of Wells Fargo stem from what appear to be huge gaps in competency and an overall lack of planning across the financial crimes risk management group. It should be noted that these points apply to Anti-Money Laundering only.
Management has been moving forward with a plan, despite widespread criticism at the investigator level, to move all teams to a 5 days in office/5 days working from home plan. This plan would be so rigid as to force you to use your own PTO if you were unable to be in the office or work from home on your assigned week. Our team has repeatedly been misled, beginning with our initial interviews, on the leniency of the company's work from home policy. As our team has bounced between leaders, each has arbitrarily raised the required minimum days remaining on cases in our queue to prevent us from working remotely. Leadership has also repeatedly dangled the prospect of across the board promotions to all Financial Crimes Consultant 2 team members to FC 3, however, as this has been in talks for over a year, and we are in yet another hiring freeze, this appears to be just another tall tale.
There appears to be little to no room for advancement in Philadelphia, as financial crimes compliance is frequently subject to hiring freezes, and they appear to be pushing to remove us physically from the building based on the above working from home plan.
This theme of arbitrary leadership decisions is a problem across all aspects of our work, and is exacerbated by the clear lack of industry knowledge and proper priorities for compliance investigations groups at all levels of management on the East Coast, but particularly at the manager and director level. Wells Fargo's program requires each and every case to be scrutinized by your direct manager, who often apply their own questionable nitpicks to what should be a streamlined, consistent production-based environment. Some managers have next to no financial crimes experience, knowledge of company systems, or leadership skills. If you are used to any autonomy in your investigative work, you will hate it here. This is the only investigative group I've been a part of where the managers have no cases of their own to complete, and are essentially QR (even though there is an actual QR with much more lenient standards as they service all teams).
These huge inconsistencies between teams are the result of an overall lack of written policies and procedures I had never encountered in a compliance program before coming to Wells Fargo. What little written guidance there is is often supplemented by verbal updates from leadership with questionable understanding of the issues at hand, and often are never even added in writing to the compliance manuals. Teams with the same pay grade, investigative mandates, and case loads are hugely inconsistent across the company to a level I had not though imaginable. This can mean the difference between one team only having to review a single account for a month time span, with another team for the same referral having to review 20 accounts over a year. There appears to be an established culture of managers and directors with no real productive casework to do, who are encouraged to add their own anal guidelines for their respective teams down the chain. Every single policy change I have seen, at the director or manager level, has consisted of them adding more work for us to do, or curtailing our privileges. It is especially insulting having compliance experience in mature programs and knowing that these changes are never actually the result of guidance stemming from the federal government or an audit, but middle managers seeking to appear more strict and thorough than the next, as they view our teams as another stepping stone to move up.
Philadelphia morale remains low as our teams are again and again subject to rules which we see our colleagues in other regions, lucky enough to be under qualified leadership, not have to deal with. Management holds us to the quantitative standards of a high volume production environment, and appears unable to create efficient processes to succeed with that level of case work. Our case load has increased unbelievably in our time, from what was an expected 3 cases completed per day, to what is now 5. It is impossible to conduct in depth reviews given that volume yet managers constantly push for more to be completed. We feel that we are always bearing the burden of management's lack of planning which caused this situation, as we are constantly understaffed, and see arbitrary priority level escalations, new monitoring referral sources, and ill-conceived policies be implemented every day.
