The new hire will join the firm in January 2018.

There's a new sheriff in town for Wells Fargo, a bank that is seeking to shake up compliance and standards following a series of recent problems. 

Wells Fargo & Company  has appointed Mike Roemer as chief compliance officer.  Yvette Hollingsworth Clark was Wells Fargo’s chief compliance officer since 2012. In June, she accepted a new role as regulatory innovation officer and Kevin Oden, head of operational risk and compliance, assumed the additional role of Wells Fargo’s chief compliance officer while a search for a permanent replacement was underway, a spokesperson explained to Family Wealth Report. 

Roemer has been in the financial sector for 27 years, and most recently served as group head of compliance for Barclays. He will join the company in January 2018 and will be based in San Francisco, the firm said in a statement yesterday.

In his new role, Roemer will be responsible for oversight of all regulatory compliance risks for Wells Fargo. As CCO, he will be responsible for ensuring that all areas of the company meet compliance management responsibilities and abide by all applicable laws and regulations.

He will report directly to Mike Loughlin, Wells Fargo’s chief risk officer and head of corporate risk.

“Wells Fargo is committed to maintaining a strong compliance program,” said Wells Fargo chief executive Tim Sloan. “Hiring a leader with Mike’s credentials is an important step in our commitment to building a stronger compliance function and a better Wells Fargo.”

Roemer joined Barclays in 2012 as head of internal audit.  Prior to Barclays, he was chief auditor at the CIT Group, where he reported directly to the board audit committee and had global responsibilities for the internal audit function. In addition, he spent 23 years at JP Morgan Chase and its predecessor organizations in various roles. 

Barclays confirmed the departure within a statement, and said: "Roemer will step down from the group executive committee and leave Barclays at the end of October 2017. Laura Padovani, currently Barclays’ head of global compliance services, will act as interim group chief compliance officer following Roemer’s departure, while an internal and external search for a successor is undertaken. Padovani will report to Barclays’ chief risk officer, C S Venkatakrishnan."

The firm thanked Roemer for his contribution to Barclays, including his contribution to the bank's Libor settlement, which this publication reported on in October 2014 .

Wells Fargo & Company has made several changes to its board of directors as the firm looks to move on from problems that have hit the company over the past year. (See that article here.) These changes come after this publication reported in July that Wells Fargo was taking legal action to take back data mistakenly given to a lawyer, responding to a story saying information from thousands of clients, some of them wealthy, had been disseminated. Also, Family Wealth Report also reported in May that Wells Fargo had put its Chicago private banking office head and two senior executives on leave pending an internal investigation. In October 2016, this publication also reported it had been embroiled in a scandal in which employees created illegal accounts to achieve sales targets.