# Wells Fargo



## Rammstein

Wells Fargo, my bank for almost 40 years, just told me that I have to liquidate my accounts with them because I live in Mexico and Mexico is not on their list of good risk assessment countries. Don't know if I should try to find another bank in the USA or move my money to a Mexican bank. Any suggestions would be welcome.


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## Gatos

Rammstein said:


> Wells Fargo, my bank for almost 40 years, just told me that I have to liquidate my accounts with them because I live in Mexico and Mexico is not on their list of good risk assessment countries. Don't know if I should try to find another bank in the USA or move my money to a Mexican bank.  Any suggestions would be welcome.


If you have $10K USD (I think)...

http://international.schwab.com/public/international/nn/open_an_account

AND a decent Mexican bank - say HSBC - (500 K Pesos).


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## lagoloo

Rammstein said:


> Wells Fargo, my bank for almost 40 years, just told me that I have to liquidate my accounts with them because I live in Mexico and Mexico is not on their list of good risk assessment countries. Don't know if I should try to find another bank in the USA or move my money to a Mexican bank. Any suggestions would be welcome.


I feel your pain. My U.S. Bank kicked a bunch of us under the bus two years ago for the same basic reason, except that they didn't even GIVE us a reason. Just "bank decision".

But, your concern is "what next"? If you've been receiving a pension or SS check, you'll need a depositing bank right away. We signed up with Actinver, a Mexican bank, which worked, but we never keep more in the account than we can afford to lose.

Someone suggested a U.S. credit union which does accept citizens living abroad. I'm not naming it for privacy concerns, but it's not really hard to find in a Google search. Since I just began with them, I can't cite experience. Good luck.


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## eastwind

And here I thought the thread would be complaining about WFC giving you an account you didn't want.


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## perropedorro

I'd like to know more about this. If you've got assets in a bank, as opposed to a loan, I can't figure why they'd care where you live. What is their risk?


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## lagoloo

That was the same question we wondered about. What we've heard since is that Banamex USA was involved in money laundering. True of false? Nobody is saying, but they are closing down the bankl.
Strange.


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## joaquinx

Bank of America has known for over 16 years that I live in Mexico and my accounts show a Mexican address.


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## perropedorro

lagoloo said:


> That was the same question we wondered about. What we've heard since is that Banamex USA was involved in money laundering. True of false? Nobody is saying, but they are closing down the bank.
> Strange.


_All_ banks are involved in laundering dirty money. Only question is if they were aware of it at the time, and plenty of evidence to indicate that the only reason they didn't know is because they went out of their way to _avoid_ knowing. Compare that to the experience of your finances being examined for a mortgage.


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## Rammstein

The rep I talked with would only say that Mexico was not on their list of approved countries.


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## Rammstein

Same for me with Wells Fargo for nearly 20 years. Guess it's something new with them.


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## Rammstein

eastwind said:


> And here I thought the thread would be complaining about WFC giving you an account you didn't want.


Yeah, you would think they would want to keep customers, not dump them.


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## Rammstein

Gatos said:


> If you have $10K USD (I think)...
> 
> http://international.schwab.com/public/international/nn/open_an_account
> 
> AND a decent Mexican bank - say HSBC - (500 K Pesos).


Thanks for the advice. I'm working on the Schwab application right now.


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## Rammstein

perropedorro said:


> I'd like to know more about this. If you've got assets in a bank, as opposed to a loan, I can't figure why they'd care where you live. What is their risk?


I posted about this on Facebook as well and was given this link for some explanation..https://thunfinancial.com/us-brokerage-accounts-american-expats-closed-2015/


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## joaquinx

Wells Fargo is having problems with issuing millions (?) of credit cards without customer approval and have been fined. Their CEO is before Congress explaining that it was the peons and not management. No one believes that. WF will be a smaller bank in the future.


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## chicois8

From the Huffington Post :

A week before Wells Fargo’s settlement was announcement, banking giant HSBC was charged with foreign-exchange trading violations. That appears to have voided a deal which allowed its bankers escaped prosecution for a persistent pattern of violating international sanctions and laundering money for the Mexican drug cartels.

Wells Fargo has a drug connection too. Wachovia, which was purchased by Wells Fargo (apparently with bailout money) in 2008, systematically laundered money for the same Mexican cartels - gangs that routinely decapitate their victims and have murdered anywhere from 65,000 to more than 100,000 people.


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## joaquinx

Diogenes is now searching for an honest bank.


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## RVGRINGO

If you qualify, USAA Fedeeral Savings Bank knows how to handle expats and their accounts, as they have been the bank of choice for military officers, and recently others, for many decades. We have been members since 1959 and it is our only bank.


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## Rammstein

RVGRINGO said:


> If you qualify, USAA Fedeeral Savings Bank knows how to handle expats and their accounts, as they have been the bank of choice for military officers, and recently others, for many decades. We have been members since 1959 and it is our only bank.


Thanks for the info but I don't qualify.


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## eastwind

chicois8 said:


> From the Huffington Post :
> 
> 
> Wachovia, which was purchased by Wells Fargo (apparently with bailout money) in 2008


Wells Fargo hit the financial crisis in much better shape than almost all the other large banks, and wanted to buy out Wachovia. Originally the Federal Reserve was trying to force a different deal for Wachovia (having, Bank America buy them out if I recall, but Wells Fargo bid a little more).

After that, the big bank bailout happened and the fed forced Wells Fargo to take bailout money, by threatening to raise their capital requirements if they did not. This was because the fed wanted all the big banks in their new "too big to fail" program of increased oversight, and they didn't want to make things look worse for some of the big banks than others, when in fact Bank America and especially Citi were in much worse shape than JP Morgan or Wells Fargo.

The Wachovia deal turned a primarily western US bank into a coast-to-coast bank, and put them firmly in the top 4 among US banks. But it also brought a big pile of legal liabilities that it seems Wells didn't know it was getting with the deal, due to various past mis-deeds by Wachovia or the banks previously taken over by Wachovia. 

That at least, is the way Wells would write the history, and there's been plenty of opportunity for someone on the inside at the fed to put out a counter-history, but that hasn't happened, so I tend to accept the story.

At least I did, I'm now questioning more deeply the things Wells has been telling its stockholders, because apparently they have a public culture and a private culture that aren't the same.

Wells Fargo did pay back their TARP money, with interest, as fast as they were allowed to. And they passed the stress tests more easily than Bank America and Citi, and were allowed to raise their dividends sooner.

Wells Fargo stock traded in the $50's before the crisis, and went all the way down under $9 per share before coming back. People who had the guts or luck to buy in the $9's and hold the stock did very well. People who owned the stock before the crash and sold out at $9 most certainly don't feel like they got a bail out. 

The stock was again around $55 before this latest scandal, and it's now down to $45, a 20% loss for some. 

Yesterday they announced a reorganization of the reporting structure at the top of WFC. I call the type of reorganization they did "squeezing the pimple". The heir apparent to the CEO, Tim Sloan, is now President and Chief Operating Officer. He got pushed up over top of a lot of the people that used to report to Stumpf, and now Stumpf has Sloan reporting to him and not much of anyone else. All the operating segments report to Sloan. 

This is good, Stumpf will be able to focus on congressional testimony and defending himself and the company from lawsuits while Sloan runs the bank and tries to fix the culture and compensation process. After Stumpf has finished out his role as congressional pinata they can fire him. If they fired Stumpf now, Sloan would have to be the pinata.


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## Gatos

We lived in South Florida for many many years. During the 'real-estate-crisis' of 2005-2009 I thought that of all the banks in the US - WF had the largest exposure to under-the-water properties. How did that all ever play out ?


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## eastwind

The TARP bailout where the feds injected cash into the banks was really only the beginning of the bailout. The fed has also kept interest rates at effectively zero for 9 years. The banks had a lot of their money tied up in loans on properties that were underwater as you say. But if the banks can borrow for nothing, it costs them nothing to just let those loans sit, even when they are getting no payments, until property values recovered and the loans became right side up once again. So the fed bought the banks time at the expense of savers and retirees who couldn't get any return on their bank savings.

The fed also allowed the banks to package these loans into "baskets" and then loaned the banks money using the baskets as collateral - allowing the banks to get liquid cash for the loans that they couldn't otherwise do anything with. This was called Quantitative Easing.

So time and low interest rates heal all wounds. But healing the banks using low interest rates over time is politically less obvious than big cash injections like TARP. It takes savers instead of tax payers, but it's the public that has paid nevertheless. On the other hand, it was the public, at least one part of it, that took out all those bad mortgages. 

The side effect of all this is that the only sane place to invest since 2007 has been the stock market. Bonds are paying less than they should given their risks, and the stock market has been inflated. So some parts of the public lost out while some benefited, depending on whether they owned property or not, had a big mortgage or not, had savings to invest or not, and how they invested those savings.

The whole thing is a lot of gray areas muddled together, I don't think oversimplifying to try to paint it in black and white is very accurate. And if one does judge what happened, one has to judge in relation to the alternatives that were not tried and whose effects therefore are unknown. 

If the government had simply allowed the too-big-to-fail banks to fail they tell us it would have been a lot worse, but that is unknowable. 

Overall I'm personally disappointed that they didn't hold people more to account, both bank executives, wall street people and people that lied on loan applications. And we got precious little in the way of regulations to prevent it from happening again in the future. 

But we also didn't hold to account our politicians who, starting years before the crisis, took banking lobby money to water down the regulations that would have prevented some of the damage. They got away with that because voters simply didn't understand what they were doing when they passed the laws. New banking regulations are not something anybody's going to try to understand before the crisis hits. But they repealed key sections of an act that was put in place in the 1930's after the Great Depression specifically to prevent certain problems from happening again - and everybody just reelected their congressmen. Ten years later it all blew up. 

Those who don't understand history repeat it without realizing it.


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## Orfin

Welss fargo was just on the stand for fraud to its customers. Senate or Congressional inquest all over national news in the US. Covertly Signing customers up to multiple or fictitious accounts and charging the customers fees for those accounts. 
I don't think Wells Fargo image ,at the moment , shows any better than being a risk to its customers. 
Banks and their dirty tricks to fleece people like a herd of sheep. 
I bet the risk they are talking about is from their being caught doing what they should have never been doing with customers and they have been forced to change things around but go about it informing customers in terms of the bank being the saint and the customer being the risk. 
Wells Fargo did a bad bad thing and are being forced to change, they are the problem and playing it off like the customer is the problem.


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## chicois8

Wells Fargo CEO resigns:
Wells Fargo CEO Stumpf Quits in Fallout From Fake Accounts - Bloomberg


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## Orfin

joaquinx said:


> Diogenes is now searching for an honest bank.


Hahaha.. I had better luck chasing the wild goose to the end of the rainbow where the pot of gold was waiting to pick like a patch of daisies. :fingerscrossed:


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## jackBnimble

There is a requirement (for ANY) financial institution in the USA to confirm your physical address. Thus PO Boxes and mailing addresses do not suffice anymore. This is a real pain - now for those of us who live abroad. The logistical problem is the confirmation of your physical address, I am fairly certain - you will likely have this problem with any other bank/broker you try to get set up with. Best to have the (physical) address of a close relative in the States?


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## joaquinx

My US bank knows that I live in Mexico. Both of my accounts are listed with my Mexican address. I believe that once you open an account with a verified address, they never ask for an update if you move.

Sent from my XT1225 using Expat Forum


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## TundraGreen

joaquinx said:


> My US bank knows that I live in Mexico. Both of my accounts are listed with my Mexican address. I believe that once you open an account with a verified address, they never ask for an update if you move.
> 
> Sent from my XT1225 using Expat Forum


I tried changing my address with a couple of US banks to Mexico. It turned out to cause a lot of problems. For example, I could no longer use my debit card in gas stations in the US because they asked for a zip code and the Mexican one didn't work. Also some of the online options didn't work if your address was outside the US. I finally went back to using a US address. Even changing it back was a pain. I couldn't do it online or over the phone. I had to wait until I was in the US and go into a branch. Since I am only in the US once a year for a few days (for my son's birthday usually), it was a pain.


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## Rammstein

joaquinx said:


> My US bank knows that I live in Mexico. Both of my accounts are listed with my Mexican address. I believe that once you open an account with a verified address, they never ask for an update if you move.
> 
> Sent from my XT1225 using Expat Forum


I changed my address in 1997 when I moved here. As always, things change. I still have not done anything in regards to closing my account and hsve not received any more requests to do so.


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