The bank said it will compensate thousands of customers with unwanted accounts and cards; how do you calculate cost of a damaged credit score?

Aaron Brodie has been dogged by poor credit for 5 years, the result, he said, of a  Wells Fargo banker giving him a credit card he didn’t ask for. Hearing about the bank’s civil settlement over alleged illegal sales practices, he called a Wells Fargo hotline, thinking help was at hand.

Wells Fargo told Mr. Brodie, 28 years old, an emergency dispatcher with the Fort Worth, TX, police department, that there was nothing it could do since the account had been sold to debt collectors.

 

“I just want somebody to say, ‘Yeah, we did this. Yeah, we were wrong,’ and maybe have my credit cleaned up,” said Mr. Brodie. He said he now can’t qualify for a mortgage.

Wells Fargo is attempting a fix-it project with little precedent in the banking world, after being accused by federal regulators of forcing thousands of banking products on its unwitting customers.

First, it must determine how many customers had accounts and other services opened without their knowledge over the past seven years (an early, partial estimate tallied as many as 2.1 million accounts). Then it must determine how these customers were affected- and how they should be compensated.

In many cases, measuring the damage requires pondering hypothetical scenarios: for instance, whether a customer’s lower credit score led to higher mortgage payments, or whether an unwanted credit card caused a customer to miss out on a loan entirely.

The bank is employing thousands of employees and consultants costing millions of dollars to solve these riddles. They are tough to crack. A good number of customers are too busy or unconcerned to respond to calls. Some customers coming forward have issues unrelated to the settlement.

How the bank responds will help determine whether it can restore its reputation and the fate of newly installed Chief Executive Timothy Sloan , who has made the clean-up process a central part of his job.

Mr. Sloan is in touch daily with executives leading customer-refund efforts and takes part in a weekly progress briefing each Monday at 7 a.m., said Justin Thornton, a bank executive who is helping to lead the customer refunding program.

“We also recognize that aside from the financial impact, we’ve broken trust with some customers and...our priority is to restore trust with our customers,” said Mr. Thornton.

 

Bank spokeswoman Mary Eshet said in a written statement Wells Fargo is contacting customers identified by The Journal “to ensure we resolve their situations to their satisfaction.”

The bank still faces a slew of state and federal investigations, including by the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission (it has said it continues to respond to requests for information). In November, new checking-account openings and credit-card applications fell by 41% and 45%, respectively, from a year ago.

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