Wells Fargo Steps Up Its Mobile Payments, Digital Options

Even now, when the name “Wells Fargo” comes up, more than a few folks out there think about the scandal of 2016 where Wells Fargo employees created fake accounts with actual user information in a bid to meet various product quotas.

Back in January, the New York Times noted that Wells Fargo “continues to struggle”, facing plummeting credit card applications numbers as well as new checking accounts. In a bid to change its disastrous fates, Wells Fargo has embarked on some new changes, which will hopefully draw back people who fled the bank after the scandal broke.

The biggest changes come from the Payments, Virtual Solutions and Innovation Group, which reveal the company is focusing on payments as well as some new technologies in a bid to drive further retail growth. Wells Fargo now offers a set of artificial intelligence and application programming interfaces (APIs), which are build around offering smoother, faster, and easier to use efforts in the payment field.

With these new tools, Wells Fargo means to follow up, reports note, by making a new line of digital banking products, especially those related to investing, to help customers reach intended financial goals. The AI will be able to take advantage of currently-existing data, reports note, to provide potential new opportunities to the sales floor based on current patterns in use.

While these advances are all noteworthy in their own right, it would be easy to think here that perhaps Wells Fargo is fixing the wrong problem. Customers aren’t fleeing in droves because Wells Fargo isn’t offering enough AI capability or sufficient digital services; customers are fleeing in droves because they trust Wells Fargo with their money and data about as much as they trust Skynet with the nukes.

Customers may well be wondering how long before the AI—which will have absolutely no ethical compunction against doing whatever it’s told by senior management—starts opening up a slew of accounts in the user’s name based on “currently-existing data.”

If customers don’t trust the parent company involved, it really doesn’t matter what that company offers. No one will take it. Wells Fargo sorely needs to build trust before it builds any new applications or services.