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Charlie Scharf

Executive

PPP
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Person
Role
Executive
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PPP
Updated

The profile

Wells Fargo chief executive since October 2019. The Federal Reserve's 2018 asset cap held the bank at $1.95 trillion when PPP opened; the Fed carved PPP out of the cap on April 8, 2020, on condition that Wells give up what it earned from the program.

Identity and role

Charles W. "Charlie" Scharf has been chief executive officer of Wells Fargo & Company, and a member of its board, since October 2019. He became chairman of the board in October 2025. Wells Fargo is based in San Francisco and trades on the New York Stock Exchange as WFC.

Biography / career arc

Scharf ran two large financial companies before Wells Fargo. According to the bank's biography, he was chief executive of Bank of New York Mellon from July 2017 to September 2019 and its chairman from January 2018, and chief executive and a director of Visa Inc. from November 2012 to December 2016. Earlier he was chief executive of Retail Financial Services at JPMorgan Chase and a managing director of One Equity Partners, JPMorgan's private-equity arm; chief executive of the retail division and chief financial officer of Bank One; and chief financial officer of Citigroup's Global Corporate and Investment Bank and of Salomon Smith Barney. He holds a bachelor's degree from Johns Hopkins University and an MBA from New York University, and is a director of Microsoft.

Pandemic-relief / PPP-EIDL role

Scharf had been in the job six months when PPP opened. The Fed had imposed the asset cap in 2018 after the fake-accounts scandal, in which the bank opened millions of accounts without customers' knowledge. The cap stood at $1.95 trillion; Wells Fargo had $1.7 trillion in consolidated assets at the end of 2019, according to CNBC.

On April 5, 2020, according to a later securities complaint, Wells Fargo said it was targeting $10 billion in PPP loans to small-business customers. On April 8 the Fed modified the cap so that PPP and Main Street Lending Program activity would not count against it. The price was the profit: CNBC reported that the Fed required Wells to send the proceeds from both programs to the Treasury or to nonprofits. A Wells release the same day, quoted in the complaint, said it would "offer loans to a broader set of its small business and nonprofit customers."

By our count of the SBA's PPP loan-level data, Wells Fargo Bank originated 280,717 PPP loans for $13.9 billion: 193,018 loans ($10.4 billion) approved in 2020 and 87,699 ($3.5 billion) in 2021. The 2020 total landed near the $10 billion the bank had named before the cap was lifted. JPMorgan Chase Bank, which had no cap, originated 452,892 loans for $44.3 billion.

Their own relief

The SBA's PPP loan-level data show no PPP loan to Wells Fargo & Company or Wells Fargo Bank as a borrower. No relief loan to Scharf personally appears in the documents cited here.

Scharf has not been charged with any crime. He was named as a defendant in one PPP suit. Ma v. Wells Fargo & Company, filed June 4, 2020 in the Northern District of California (No. 3:20-cv-03697), is a securities class action against the bank, Scharf and chief financial officer John R. Shrewsberry for the period April 5 to May 5, 2020. It alleges that Wells Fargo "planned to, and did, improperly allocate government-backed loans under the PPP," and that its public statements were therefore misleading. The complaint says the stock fell more than 5% over two trading days, to $26.84 on April 21, 2020, after reports of a borrower suit claiming the bank put larger loans ahead of the first-come, first-served order. These are allegations.

Borrowers filed their own suits over how Wells processed PPP applications. A plaintiff asked the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation to combine them, with the Ma case, as MDL No. 2954. The panel refused on August 5, 2020. It found that individual facts about each loan application would swamp any efficiency and that Ma raised "distinct factual and legal issues particular to investors." The documents cited here do not record how the Ma case ended.

Wells Fargo Bank was also one of seven lenders sued by PPP loan agents seeking a share of lender fees in American Video Duplicating, Inc. v. Citibank, N.A. (C.D. Cal. No. 2:20-cv-03815). The court dismissed the amended complaint on November 16, 2020, holding that the CARES Act gives agents no private right to those fees without an agreement with the lender, and the parties stipulated to dismissal with prejudice on February 2, 2021.

Where they are now (2025–2026)

On June 3, 2025 the Federal Reserve announced that Wells Fargo had met the conditions of the 2018 enforcement action and was no longer subject to the asset-growth restriction; the order's other provisions stay in place until the bank meets them. "We are a different and far stronger company today because of the work we've done," Scharf said. The bank gave each of its full-time employees a $2,000 award and put its workforce at 215,000.

The board then said it intended to make Scharf chairman and granted him a one-time award of $30 million in restricted share rights and 1,046,000 stock options, vesting after the fourth, fifth and sixth anniversaries of the grant. He took the chair in October 2025.

Sources

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