Wells Fargo · Financial Crimes Supervisor I
A team ranked last, and a process that wouldn't scale
You inherit a team sitting dead last out of seven, doing high-stakes investigative work through a slow, manual process. The easy move is to push people harder. The move that actually works is to figure out why the system they work inside is losing, and fix that instead.
I took over a team of sixteen financial-crimes specialists ranked last of seven. Four months later they were first. People assume the story is about motivation. It was mostly about looking at what the team was actually fighting all day, and noticing it was not each other or the caseload. It was the process.
The problem
A team at the bottom of a ranking is easy to misread. The reflex is to conclude the people are the problem and to manage by pressure: more cases, longer hours, a tighter dashboard. That almost never addresses why the numbers are low, and it burns out the people you need. High-stakes fraud work makes it worse, because every case carries a real dollar loss and a real regulatory exposure, so fear of getting it wrong quietly slows everyone down.
Underneath the ranking was a second, larger problem. The investigation itself ran on a manual, stitched-together process. Good investigators spent a large share of their day assembling information by hand before they could even start thinking. The work that required judgment was gated behind work that just required patience, and that bottleneck did not care how motivated anyone was.
How I worked it
First the immediate loop. I ran daily coaching and error review, not as surveillance but as a fast feedback cycle: here is the call you made, here is where the reasoning held, here is where it slipped, and here is how to see it sooner next time. Error review sounds punitive. Done in the open, quickly, and applied to me as much as to them, it becomes the thing that makes a team trust its own decisions. Consistency followed, and the ranking followed the consistency.
That fixed the symptom. The bottleneck was the real target. Working with others, I helped design a proprietary internal investigations tool, built with Six Sigma methodology so the improvement was measured rather than assumed. The goal was specific: take the manual assembly work that ate an investigator's morning and let the tool do it, so the human spent their time on the part that actually needed a human. Collapse the steps that added no judgment, surface the information that did.
The part I am proudest of is that it did not stay ours. The tool ended up used daily by more than five thousand employees across business units. That only happens when a tool is built for the person doing the work rather than for the person who built it, when someone with no special training can sit down and get expert-quality output from it. That principle, build the thing so the people who inherit it can actually run it, became the through-line of everything I have built since.
What it came down to
A ranking is a symptom. The useful question is never why is this team losing, it is what system are they losing inside, and can that system be rebuilt so that doing the job well is the path of least resistance. Turn the workflow around and the people are free to be as good as they already were.
I build software now, but the job is the same one. Most of what I ship is tooling that lets a non-technical person run something that used to require a specialist, handed off so they own it and are not dependent on me. That is the investigations tool again, in a different decade.