YouSaid · the spoken record

Charlie Scharf

lines on the record: 30
first: 2026-04-30
most recent: 2026-04-30
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“We have looked at all of the things we do within Wells. We've sold 22 businesses. We did it to eliminate hobbies, to get rid of things that we just weren't interested investing in. We have four big lines of businesses. We're incredibly excited about all four. All four have really strong returns, have really great growth prospects. Our consumer deposit lending business, it's our wealth management business where we have 12,000 some odd advisors across the country. It's our commercial bank where we've got almost 15% share in a lot of the things that we do. And it's our corporate investment bank. All of them have very strong returns and strong opportunities to grow. And they fit together inside the Wells Fargo franchise to allow us to have just greater breadth and greater depth of what we can do for customers.”
2026-04-30 · The David Rubenstein Show · Charlie Scharf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Serve people locally. We have big companies in this country, and we need big banks to do things for those companies. Netflix decides that it wants to enter the bidding fray for Time Warner. They call us in. We were involved in the transaction. We made a $30 billion commitment. Those things have to get done if we're going to continue to see the capital markets activity. And you need big banks to do that. And if it's not us, it's going to be the Europeans, it's going to be the Japanese who are coming back ultimately the Chinese. And so, you know, our banks do have to scale with the growth in the economy. It doesn't mean that big versus small, both are necessary. We do different things and we try and support small banks because we know they play an incredibly important role.”
2026-04-30 · The David Rubenstein Show · Charlie Scharf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have 4,000 banks in the country. And when we think about financial services, you really do have to think beyond banks these days, right? You talked about private credit. $1.7 trillion of lending is now done away from banks. You've got all of the different things that are being done in the private equity space. And so the definition of what's done in the banking sphere has changed very dramatically. We need banks of all sizes. We're not going to have branches in every location. We don't have the relationships that they have. The standards that we have to live with under when it comes to lending are different than small banks do. If you're in a small bank in a local community, I'll make a loan to you based upon what I know about you. I knew you as a kid. I knew your parents. I know you're going to pay me back. I know exactly what you're going through. We can't do that. The OCC is going to come in and they're going to say, what are you crazy? No way. So we need a broad cross-section of banks to”
2026-04-30 · The David Rubenstein Show · Charlie Scharf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have uncertainty with what's going on with the Iran conflict. It's been a bull market for a long time. There's a huge amount of liquidity in the system. There's this underlying current that things are going to be fine for a long period of time. There are a lot of people in the financial services space, in banks and outside of banks that have never been through cycles, like a real cycle in terms of what that means. And there's a point at which that's going to turn, and that's going to have a whole bunch of impacts that I'm not sure we all really understand. Something's going to happen, but then more long term, it's just the question of the deficit.”
2026-04-30 · The David Rubenstein Show · Charlie Scharf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's incredibly important. And I really dislike when people talk about lobbying like it's some awful horrible thing. Showing up and trying to convince a senator or a congressperson at the last minute that what I think is right when it's clear that it's just going to benefit me goes nowhere. What really matters is over a period of time building a relationship with members and their staffs where you're honest about what works, what doesn't work, what the risks are, and so that when they need to actually have a position on something, they're more educated. And sometimes we agree on those things. There are plenty of members who I've got a huge amount of respect for it. We don't agree on something, but it doesn't mean I'm not going to talk to them, and it doesn't mean that we might not agree on the next thing.”
2026-04-30 · The David Rubenstein Show · Charlie Scharf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There were a series of individual things that the regulators identified. They were right about them. We can argue about whether the punishment fit the crime, whether an asset cap is the right thing to do for a company like ours, but they weren't wrong about the underlying issues. And what happens is you get to the point where if you're not resolving the issues quickly enough, they say, okay, we need to get your attention. We're not getting your attention. So the next step is you can't grow. And so that's what they did. We need banks of all sizes. Our banks do have to scale with the growth in the economy. It doesn't mean that big versus small both are necessary. We do different things and we try and support small banks because we know they play an incredibly important role.”
2026-04-30 · The David Rubenstein Show · Charlie Scharf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of increasing the spend. We've grown our trading capabilities, we've grown our investment banking advisory capabilities, we have our fee-based treasury management businesses. And so that along with our wealth management business will get paid on fees, that's what we focused on.”
2026-04-30 · The David Rubenstein Show · Charlie Scharf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's very, very hard. So, there are things you can't do and the things you can do. You've got to be, first of all, very selective in looking at your balance sheet and saying, okay, it's not the worst thing in the world to say we need to become more efficient on our balance sheet. What's less efficient? Where do we make less money? How do we reallocate that balance sheet usage? You then turn to certain things and say we're just not going to be active about soliciting loans. We're not going to be active about soliciting deposits. We were very careful not to throttle consumer deposits because you tell a consumer to please bring your deposit elsewhere and you've lost that relationship. Large corporates understand. They understand we have an asset cap. They understand we want to take their money, but we just can't right now. deposits at the time and we focused a lot on businesses that drove fee-based revenues. So we've grown our credit card business dramatically, which includes a significant portion of”
2026-04-30 · The David Rubenstein Show · Charlie Scharf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've had multiple constraints. The biggest one that people know about is there was an asset cap put in place. So at the time, I think it was 2018, we were told that our assets at the time were $1.952 trillion, and they couldn't go higher than that until the consent order work was done to their satisfaction.”
2026-04-30 · The David Rubenstein Show · Charlie Scharf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First, I was very hard to leave because I was at Bank of New York Mellon, which I went in maybe a year and a half before I started these conversations, and I didn't intend to leave. I intended to stay there for the rest of my career if they would have had me. But I knew someone on the Wells Fargo board from another board than Amman, and he was on me about you should engage, you should engage, you can be in New York. We have a lot more in New York than you think, which was important to me. And then I just, you kind of go through what Wells is. competed against him for years and I believed and I believe today more than ever it's an incredibly important amazing financial institution in”
2026-04-30 · The David Rubenstein Show · Charlie Scharf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With the dog We were all reunited in San Francisco. And then it just became very clear for personal reasons with one of my kids that we just couldn't be that far away.”
2026-04-30 · The David Rubenstein Show · Charlie Scharf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was there until 2012? So I got to bank one in 2000. I started out as CFO, wound up running the retail businesses for a couple of years. When we sold Bank One to J.P. Morgan, Iran, the retail businesses until 2011, then a year in the private equity business. And then I went to run visa”
2026-04-30 · The David Rubenstein Show · Charlie Scharf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Jamie was 29, 30 years old at the time, was CFO, played a really important role. But he was one of six or seven really senior people. And it was really over the next three, four, five, six years that Jamie asserted himself in terms of what his capabilities were. One of the things when I talk to younger people all the time, I say, you know, they always ask about who he role models and who do you learn the most from. And for me, it's just being able to see you think you can learn a whole lot from someone who's the most successful. But in reality, you learn bits and pieces from different people and figure out how it works for you.”
2026-04-30 · The David Rubenstein Show · Charlie Scharf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I graduated college in 87, and so I started going through all these interview programs in different investment banks up in New York because I was from the New York area. And then something else came along.”
2026-04-30 · The David Rubenstein Show · Charlie Scharf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, banking was not there yet. I said, I want a better education, I want a much broader education. And I just got convinced in talking to people that college is this great opportunity to learn a broad set of things. I've got nothing against business schools or things like that, but there's plenty of time to learn accounting. Most of that stuff you'll learn on the job anyway. College is a great example to learn about international relations, political science, psychology, sociology, so I changed my major to what Hopkins had this wonderful thing called social and behavioral sciences area major, where you were allowed to take a broad set of classes and all those types of things that I just said. And I loved it. I loved the people. I loved the professors, the students, I love the work. And I think I'm a better person for it.”
2026-04-30 · The David Rubenstein Show · Charlie Scharf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Johns Hopkins. I wanted to be a research chemist. And I loved science in high school. I loved math and I love science. My parents were always encouraging of learning broad things and trying to find what you wanted. And both my brother and I were both very much math and science people. And I go to Hopkins. First semester I take organic chemistry where you're in with all the Hopkins pre-meds, which was probably the worst experience in my life.”
2026-04-30 · The David Rubenstein Show · Charlie Scharf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My dad was, at the time, was called a stockbroker, now we call it a financial advisor. He worked till he was 77, loved the markets, still loves the markets. My mom was a teacher because she wanted to be able to be there when we came home from school. And then ultimately went to work at AT&T and went into technology.”
2026-04-30 · The David Rubenstein Show · Charlie Scharf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The ATM business, it's marginally profitable, but it's important. It's convenience. And, you know, its cash is becoming less important over a period of time. People are able to deposit checks on their phones and not having to go to ATMs anymore. But it's a little like branches. We can debate about what the future is going to look like in 20 or 30 years, but customers tell you what they want and what they like. And they like convenience. There's still plenty of cash that circulates out there, especially in our customer base. And until they stop using ATMs, we're going to still have them for them.”
2026-04-30 · The David Rubenstein Show · Charlie Scharf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The truth? Get to Wells, and first thing I want to do is get a Wells Fargo credit card, and so I get the new card, and I was out to dinner with some good friends who run some big companies, and I pull out my card and I got tonight.”
2026-04-30 · The David Rubenstein Show · Charlie Scharf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We think about the competitive advantages that we have versus who we compete with. When you kind of step back and look over the last 10 or 15 years and say, you know, what have the fintechs done to the banking space? I think first and foremost, it's made it very clear to people who run banks. And then when you go to one of those companies, you look at a company like us and say they have 70 million customers. And if they were to get some of these things right, think about how hard it's going to be for us to compete with them. So it puts a huge amount of pressure on us to have to deliver things in different ways if we didn't have that kind of competition. But we know it's...”
2026-04-30 · The David Rubenstein Show · Charlie Scharf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I personally do. We've enabled most of the company with some of the basic AI tools, but we're at the very beginning. And we're kind of going through pieces because we've got to monitor it in a couple of different ways. Number one is how we use the tools ourselves to either become more efficient or deliver differentiated products and services for our customers. Number two is we lend a lot of money to a lot of people. And so understanding how AI is going to impact their businesses matters a lot to us. And then we've got the question of just like how is AI going to change our business model. We're most advanced in that order, but we're towards the beginning of it. But it's incredibly powerful and we're going to see meaningful benefits.”
2026-04-30 · The David Rubenstein Show · Charlie Scharf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think private credit's about crumpled. When you look at private credit, when you just look at the size of private credit, it's not big enough to be a systemic risk broadly the way we think about systemic risks that have existed in the past. But it's credit. And there's been a huge amount of money that's flown into these products, both institutional and retail. And we've all seen this in the past when there's just a lot of money that needs to get invested because that's the only way that these firms get paid is to actually invest. It doesn't always work out well. And we're in an area where we've been in this bull market for a long period of time. We haven't seen any recession in over a decade. You will see credit deterioration at some point in time.”
2026-04-30 · The David Rubenstein Show · Charlie Scharf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's one of the issues that's got to get solved because you've got people who are in office for four or eight years, they've got their own agenda on what they want to accomplish. They're not going to be there to solve that problem. And they don't have the same kinds of immediate pressures that companies have when they become overleveraged.”
2026-04-30 · The David Rubenstein Show · Charlie Scharf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's something we've got to be conscious about the position the US dollar has in the world. We can't assume that we just have this God-given right to be the reserve currency, but it's going to take a long time for people to get comfortable with something else other than dollar, and it's in our control.”
2026-04-30 · The David Rubenstein Show · Charlie Scharf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's the short term impact, and then there's the longer term impact. We have a lot of money where we pay zero rates. And so when what we earn falls, then that squeezes our margins because we can't lower zero what we pay customers or 0.5 basis points. Rising rate environment is certainly helpful for something like that. But what's most important is what are the reasons underlying it? Because the amount of money that we'll make in any given quarter from a favorable interest rate curve for us is de minimis compared to what it does to the underlying base of our customers. So if the economy is healthy, the economy is growing, inflation's under control, people are growing inventories, people are spending, that's what's going to really drive profitability of banks. 95% of our revenues come from the US. We really live and breathe by the success of the U.S. customer in the U.S. business.”
2026-04-30 · The David Rubenstein Show · Charlie Scharf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For a while because they have long term contracts to buy some of these things, but that will come down the pike. And if the conflict ends, the straits open up, production returns in some reasonable period of time, there will be this impact on consumer spend on some of these other things. But in that kind of environment, it won't be damaging. If this goes on for a longer period of time, it can be more damaging.”
2026-04-30 · The David Rubenstein Show · Charlie Scharf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right now, from everything that we see, the economy is still extremely strong. We all just reported our first quarter results in the banking space. Loan demand is decent, delinquencies on the consumer side are extremely well controlled. Consumer spend is growing on a year-over-year basis. They're spending more money on gas, but making adjustments in some of the other categories. Businesses have gone into this in strong financial shape. So those are all the good things. But then when you ask them how they feel, everyone's nervous. And so, you know, they're not laying off, but they're not hiring to the extent that they would hire. Neutral to just beginning to see some potential for some negative impacts. The real question is going to be is how long does oil and gas prices stay high? People always think about the gas pump, but it's all these other things that matter. They're fine.”
2026-04-30 · The David Rubenstein Show · Charlie Scharf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think right now there's pretty clear consensus that it would be the wrong thing to do until the Iran conflict is clear what the end is in sight there's real risk out there I mean I think as you hear voting committee members talk about it there's a high degree of consistency including I think from Treasury Secretary in terms of you know waiting to see how this all plays out and that seems like the prudent thing to do”
2026-04-30 · The David Rubenstein Show · Charlie Scharf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But even as it comes to who he's choosing to nominate for the Fed, in this case he's chosen someone who has a point of view on what's going on in the world, AI, what it's going to mean for jobs, what it's going to mean for productivity. And it's got to be approved by Congress. But this idea that there's total separation is just not true, but it is true when it gets to the actual decision making.”
2026-04-30 · The David Rubenstein Show · Charlie Scharf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The independence of the Fed is critical, not just here in the US, but in other parts of the country. And when you think about just the way our governing system works, it's different than a place like China where there's long-term management, long-term goals, high coordination across all the different areas of government. Here we have a political infrastructure that turns over, which has points of views. And we have a more long-term structure in place at the Fed. The committee vote is extremely important. And so, you know, creating the right kind of balance between physical and monetary policy to get to the best outcome is extremely important. There's no reason, in my mind, why the president shouldn't have a point of view. All presidents have for a long period of time. They've done it in different ways. This president does it very vocally in terms of what his points of views are.”
2026-04-30 · The David Rubenstein Show · Charlie Scharf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source