Wells Fargo & Co. is a diversified financial services company in the United States with consumer finance subsidiaries doing business in Canada and Puerto Rico.
Headquartered in San Francisco, California (its bank, Wells Fargo Bank, N.A., is legally chartered in Sioux Falls, South Dakota), Wells Fargo is a result of a merger between California-based Wells Fargo & Co. and Minneapolis-based Norwest Corporation in 1998. The new company chose to keep the name Wells Fargo, to capitalize on the 150-year history of the nationally-recognized Wells Fargo name and its trademark stagecoach. After the merger, the company maintained its headquarters in San Francisco.
Wells Fargo offers a wide range of financial services, claiming in its investor presentations to operate more than 80 divisions while being somewhat ambiguous over just what constitutes a business divisions in that context. In addition, the company claims to be one of the most "integrated" of financial services companies. For example, instead of running a stock brokerage with separate branches and different customers, Wells Fargo stock brokers sit in retail branches, and generally only serve banking customers.
Despite this wide range of divisions, Wells Fargo only delineates three different business segments when reporting results: Retail Banking, Wholesale Banking, and Consumer Finance. This is unlike many other financial services companies which provide more detail about particular businesses or product lines.
English
Wells Fargo & Co. is a diversified financial services company in the United States with consumer finance subsidiaries doing business in Canada and Puerto Rico.