A senior executive at Wells Fargo told investors the San Francisco-based bank isn’t done shrinking its head count or its footprint.
“There should be less people,” Chief Financial Officer Mike Santomassimo said during a presentation at the UBS Financial Services Conference in Key Biscayne, Florida.
He noted that the bank had cut staff every quarter for more than five years, reducing its workforce by around 70,000 since 2019, when CEO Charlie Scharf joined, promising to turn the fourth-largest U.S. bank around after fake accounts and sales practice scandals drew criticism and fines. Scharf made sweeping changes, including dramatically shrinking the bank’s workforce and selling off properties it no longer needed.
As of the end of 2025, Wells Fargo’s workforce numbered around 205,000, according to its most recent quarterly earnings report.
Santomassimo did not identify where any layoffs or real estate sales would occur. But public records show that Wells Fargo has recently laid off workers in Sacramento, California; Raleigh, North Carolina; and West Des Moines, Iowa.
Wells Fargo has pulled back sharply from home lending, concentrating on its existing customers and members of underserved communities. The bank sees better growth opportunities in credit cards, wealth management and other business lines.
Efficiency moves
As it has trimmed its payroll, the bank has also steadily thinned its real estate portfolio.
Last fall, the company parted with its historic former headquarters at 420 Montgomery St. in San Francisco’s Financial District, saying goodbye to the office building that stands on the spot where the bank was founded in 1852, according to Wells Fargo marketing materials. The bank did some $90 million worth of renovations to the property in the past decade.
The approximately 409,000-square-foot building famously housed a 19th-century stagecoach that was once part of the Wells Fargo History Museum, but the building was left mostly vacant after the bank moved most of its operations down the street to 333 Market St. in 2024 and put the building on the market.
In 2023, it sold a two-building office property at 550 California St. in downtown San Francisco for over $40 million, significantly less than the $108 million it paid in 2005.
While Wells Fargo remains headquartered in San Francisco, it has gradually shifted its operations to other financial hubs such as Charlotte, North Carolina, and New York City, where Scharf is based along with other senior executives.
Santomassimo said that “across almost every part of the company, there's still more to do to make things as efficient as they should be.” He added that “outside of the personnel costs, there’s also still more real estate to go.”
“I always tell people, we’ve got a couple of buildings for sale in different cities,” he quipped. “So if you’re interested, call.”
Nationwide real estate changes
Wells Fargo occupies about 46 million square feet of office space across North America, according to CoStar data, a footprint that also includes major hubs in cities such as Minneapolis, San Antonio and St. Louis.
Late last year, the bank opened a $570 million office campus in North Texas that promises to boost the region’s standing as a national financial hub that’s served as home to giants such as Comerica and Charles Schwab.
More than 4,500 employees work out of the 22-acre complex along Lake Carolyn in Irving, Texas, about 12 miles northwest of downtown Dallas.
Despite its growth elsewhere, the bank has insisted that California still plays a critical role in its real estate plans as well as in its history, and that the bank has no intention of moving.
San Francisco, in particular, "remains important to the bank,” a spokesperson told CoStar News in late 2024.
Those sentimental ties haven’t immunized the Bay Area from the financial heavyweight’s efforts to streamline its real estate holdings and curb extraneous expenses.
The changes Wells Fargo has made to its San Francisco real estate footprint expand a company-wide downsizing it kicked off in early 2021 when it began hunting for a subtenant to take over more than 130,200 square feet of office space it had been leasing at 45 Fremont St. as well as almost 70,000 square feet it had occupied across the bay in Oakland. And in November it sold a 24-acre office campus in Fremont, in Silicon Valley, that had housed a bank processing center. A developer plans to replace it with a 336-unit multifamily complex.