Wells Fargo

Wells Fargo offers a wide range of financial services, claiming in its investor presentations to operate more than 80 divisions while still being able to stand for more then one thing. In addition, the company claims to be one of the most "integrated" of financial services companies. For example, instead of running a stock brokerage with separate branches and different customers, Wells Fargo stock brokers sit in retail branches, and generally only serve banking customers. (wellsfargo.com)

Despite this wide range of divisions, Wells Fargo only describes in detail three different business segments when reporting results, which are Retail Banking, which is typically your everyday banking where you have your savings, checking accounts, loan officers, mortgage lenders and credit card companies. Wholesales Banking, in which this segment contains products sold to large companies, as well as to consumers on a wholesale basis. This includes lending mutual funds, asset-based lending, and commercial real estate. Consumer Finance and which is a lending to consumers, as far as home loan, automobile loans and student loans. This is unlike many other financial services companies which provide more detail about particular businesses or product lines.

Wells Fargo dominating the financial services by being one of the largest in the world, they are not too concerned about competitions such as US Bancorp, Citi Financial, BB&T, PNC Financial, and Country Wide, simply because most of these companies are not touching every sections of the market like Wells Fargo. Most of the banking companies are consumer lending banks, or just retail banking, but is not giving out any mortgage or in the case with Country Wide would give out mortgage but would not give out any consumer loans. Wells Fargo is able to do all three and more so it has given them the advantage to dominate the market for so long.

It's not unlikely that another company would come and take over the place of Wells Fargo as far as also dominating the financial market, because they are a lot of independent companies hoping to get the same success as Wells Fargo and they are all learning from the mistakes of other companies who succeed and failed, but also gaining a lot of knowledge from the same companies. If one is out there, it would have to be a company well established already or merging with one who is well established.

The largest Threat to the market of banking would have to be the Government with the changing of interest rates and pricing of a lot of products. If the interest rates drop then that helps the market and people go take more loans out and spend more money at the same time, but if interest rates go up as they are now, consumers tend to just save money and not spend as much, also not take out any loans. Which in the end hurts the whole market?

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