Wells Fargo taps head of consumer banking to lead on AI

• Key Insight: Wells Fargo has tapped its head of consumer and small-business banking, Saul Van Beurden, to lead its expanding efforts in artificial intelligence.
• Supporting Data: Just in the past year, Wells Fargo has trained over 90,000 employees to use new AI tools, according to CEO Charlie Scharf.
• Expert Quote: The new appointment is “a signal that from the top down, we really think [AI] is important,” said Truist Securities analyst Brian Foran.

Wells Fargo has chosen one of its senior banking executives as its new leader of AI.

Saul Van Beurden, who is currently CEO of consumer and small-business banking, will spearhead the bank’s artificial intelligence efforts, the San Francisco-based lender announced on Thursday.

“Saul will partner with our business leaders to ensure they are leading their own transformation and will be accountable to me for consistent and meaningful progress across the company,” Wells Fargo CEO Charlie Scharf said in a prepared statement.

At the same time, Kleber Santos, the bank’s CEO of consumer lending, is being promoted to co-CEO — together with Van Beurden — of a newly combined department of consumer banking and lending.

“Mr. Santos and Mr. Van Beurden have been working closely for some time to deliver a seamless experience for consumers,” Wells Fargo said in the statement. “Therefore, naming them co-CEOs and combining the businesses formally is a natural out-growth of how they work today.”

In addition, the bank said, this new partnership will free up Van Beurden to “spend a meaningful portion of his time driving AI across the company.”

Van Beurden has been at Wells Fargo for six years. From 2019 to 2023, he was the bank’s head of technology, and since then he’s been in charge of consumer and small-business banking.

Wells Fargo’s chief information officer, Tracy Kerrins, was still the bank’s head of generative AI as of earlier this month. It was not immediately clear where Kerrins would fit in the new chain of command, and Wells Fargo did not respond to American Banker’s questions by the time of publication.

In recent years, Wells Fargo has invested heavily in its AI capabilities. In 2021, it began partnering with Google Cloud, and the following year the bank launched its virtual assistant, Fargo, powered by the tech giant’s conversational AI platform.

In August 2025, the lender announced that it was beginning to roll out generative and agentic AI for all 215,000 of its employees. Over time, bankers, marketers, the customer relations team and the corporate team will all receive AI agents and tools from Google Cloud, the bank said.

Just in the past year, Scharf said on Thursday, Wells Fargo has trained over 90,000 employees in the new technology and deployed AI tools to more than 180,000 desktops.

“Generative and agentic AI will reshape competitive dynamics across every industry, and we are embracing these tools as we have embraced robotic process automation and machine learning for years,” the CEO said.

Wells Fargo is far from the only bank to harness this new technology. JPMorganChase has rolled out generative AI to almost all its employees, and Citi has been introducing agentic AI to all 40,000 of its developers, automating simple tasks like software patches and upgrades.

“It’s something you’re seeing across the banks, increasingly,” said Brian Foran, an analyst at Truist Securities, whose parent company Truist Financial just announced its own chief AI officer on Wednesday.

In general, when a bank appoints an executive specifically for AI, Foran said, it shows a level of seriousness about the technology.

“It’s a signal that from the top down, we really think this is important,” Foran said. “We think it’s important enough to create a senior executive role and carve it out.”

One reason why banks in particular may be so eager to invest in AI, Foran said, is that the technology has the potential to reduce or at least limit the need for human employees.

“It’s still a very people-heavy business,” he said, referring to the banking industry. “And if you can keep your headcount flat for the next five years, and just incrementally add capacity with AI tools, that would be a huge win.”