Wells Fargo Bank likes to think of itself as an exception to the rule. With a 2015 net income of $23 billion, and 265,000 employees in 9,000 locations, there is much to safeguard here. The burden falls largely to Vice President of Incident Management Christopher Terzich and his team of 26 strategically distributed emergency managers. Together they anticipate crises, ensure employee safety and help customers gain access to their finances even in times of disaster.
The team can cite the usual round of fundamentals in explaining its approach to driving business continuity. There’s experience: FEMA-trained managers, some with three decades’ police work to their credit. There’s the ongoing preparedness program, supported by a corporate intelligence unit that tracks a range of potential hazards on a global scale. Topmost, though, is the matter of outreach. Wells Fargo emergency professionals say their ties to the community are the bedrock that underlies their efforts.
During an emergency, businesses worry about employees, customers and community — usually in that order. “In most companies it is fairly sequential, and community outreach is the third priority,” said Peter Ohtaki, the bank’s San Francisco Bay Area regional emergency manager. “At Wells Fargo it is very much at the front of our work efforts and priorities.”
The bank has done extensive work to build up its credibility in the emergency management community, to make itself a trusted partner. In return Wells Fargo has become a go-to player. It has struck formal relationships with regional emergency organizations, and its crisis teams routinely are invited into the emergency operations center.
Things didn’t always run this smoothly, said Terzich, who has been with the bank for almost 30 years. He recalled the mood of self-congratulation when the emergency team unveiled its first corporate disaster preparedness plan on Sept. 10, 2001. “We were quite proud of ourselves — until the very next day, when we realized how much more there still was to do,” he said.
The Republican National Convention in Cleveland raised concerns that brought a needed coordination between Wells Fargo and agencies like the Secret Service, and DHS, plus state emergency managers and city public safety officials. Photo by Flickr/Erik Drost
In the ensuing years, Terzich has become an embodiment of the bank’s outreach approach to emergency readiness.
He has served as president of the InfraGard Minnesota Members Alliance, a partnership between the FBI and the private sector that shares information and tactics for protecting critical infrastructure and key resources. He chairs the Regional Consortium Coordinating Council, one of the partnership councils recognized by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in the National Infrastructure Protection Plan. He also served as a working group member on the National Infrastructure Advisory Council, giving input on critical infrastructure and the National Incident Management System.
What all those activities add up to, he said, is the ability to get timely information and make smart decisions. Terzich pointed for example to the recent papal visit to Philadelphia, a mass crowd event in an area rich with Wells Fargo assets. “We had team members taking part in the planning effort for months and months, looking to see how we could all come to work, while still maintaining security,” he said.
Those relationships can make a tangible difference in times of actual emergency. In the midst of 2012’s Hurricane Sandy, when some groups made a premature call for evacuation, Terzich was able to tell his people to stay put, based on information from more trustworthy sources. “At a time when there was all sorts of conflicting information, we were able to push back,” he said. “When information was ambiguous we were able to ask for clarification.”
That same experience has played out among the bank’s regional emergency management leaders across the nation.
Wells Fargo’s emergency management effort may stretch across the global enterprise, but it is structured to play out at the local level, with regional managers situated centrally to the bank’s activities, including the United States corps, plus one in Hong Kong. “Our goal is to mirror where our customers are and where our communities are,” Terzich said. “A foot of snow in Minneapolis in winter is not a significant issue, whereas three inches of snow in Charlotte [N.C.] can bring the city to a standstill. So we want to have as much local control as possible.”
Chris Cowart exercised that local control when the Republican National Committee came to Cleveland this summer. Based in Georgia, he’s a regional emergency manager overseeing 93 site emergency plans covering 20,000 employees in seven states.
The convention fell in his territory, a mass event that raised concerns about everything from transportation disruptions to public demonstrations. To prepare, he coordinated with Homeland Security, the Secret Service, state emergency managers and city’s public safety. “We want to be as prepared as we can be, and that means we want to share as much information as we can, to make sure everybody has the same information and shares the same messages,” he said.
The bank shares more than information. In response to disasters, such as the Texas flooding in spring 2015, it has sometimes deployed a Mobile Response Unit. This 75-foot, heavy-duty “office on wheels” takes banking services directly to customers after a disaster. The unit has private offices and is equipped with computers, a cellular data feed with satellite backup and self-contained generators. Bank employees can offer mortgage assistance, process insurance claim checks and deliver other recovery-related services.
Cowart said the preparedness community has welcomed the participation of a private-sector partner. “Many of the state emergency management agencies now have a business-sector liaison. They recognize the value of working with the private sector,” he said. “If a community is going to recover quickly after a disaster, businesses have to be open. Commerce has to be flowing.”
Corporate Continuity CoreThe Incident Management Team makes up the heart of the Wells Fargo emergency management operation, which is responsible for keeping employees safe and ensuring business continues even in times of crisis. Specifically, emergency managers are charged with providing:
|
“We have a number of experts — from corporate properties, from risk and insurance, from business continuity. There are a lot of people who can assist us when we have something that takes a lot of horsepower,” Cowart said. “That allows us to manage it at the local level, and then to escalate information up through those established channels.”
In fact, that high-level expertise may even help Cowart and other emergency managers to pre-empt crises, by preparing them with a deeper level of threat intelligence than a typical corporate incident manager might enjoy. Specifically, the bank’s emergency apparatus includes a threat intelligence unit composed of four individuals: one in Minnesota, one in Arizona and two in Washington, D.C., whose job is to track any and all threat activity that could impact bank interests.
They watch for hurricanes and track wildfires. They monitor disease outbreaks and keep tabs on political unrest — “any kind of emerging external danger to our customers and our team members,” Terzich said. “They don’t attempt to be all-seeing, but they do attempt to identify when a situation is changing. They watch when there is instability, and they look at the possible trajectories.”
The team sends out travel advisories and weather watches. It offers economic updates, and it churned out a steady stream of reports around Brexit, Britain’s recent vote to leave the European Union. Does all of this touch on emergency management? The point is: It could. “If you see a threat, you don’t necessarily have to respond to it, but you do have to make sure somebody has the ball. You have to get it to the right place,” said Terzich. The threat intelligence unit fills in that piece of the puzzle.
Resources such as these have helped the bank to establish itself as an integral element of the emergency team in many communities.
In the South, for example, the Contingency Planning Association of the Carolinas numbers Wells Fargo among its sponsors, alongside corporations like Duke Energy and Lowe’s, as well as other financial institutions including BB&T and Bank of America.
In the Midwest, Regional Incident Manager Jeff McClaran chairs the Safeguard Iowa Partnership. He brings a sterling pedigree to both tasks: An emergency medical technician, he is also a certified master anti-terrorism specialist, certified homeland security level IV, a search-and-recovery diver and a weapons-of-mass-destruction-rated first responder.
In Northern California, Ohtaki said the bank is deeply integrated into the local emergency response community — a level of involvement that has been in the making for some time. In 2012 the bank signed a memorandum of understanding with the California Emergency Management Agency (now the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services), agreeing to provide mutual assistance and share resources.
“Our private partners play a critical role in emergency response,” Mark Ghilarducci, the agency’s director, said at the time. “Having organizations such as Wells Fargo who are willing and able to help provide emergency assistance and resources to affected communities in times of need is a benefit to all Californians. These partnerships increase our resources, help us better coordinate and deliver the services our residents will need during times of emergency, and they help our local communities get back on their feet.”
As a result, the Wells Fargo team is often invited to be a part of the EOC to help coordinate emergency response. The bank can help to deploy mobile ATMs, for example, to ensure residents can access cash during a crisis.
Ohtaki’s role goes beyond the financial sector. He teams with technology partners to help deliver mobile communications, and he works with the food and beverage industry to coordinate delivery of emergency supplies. “We can help mobilize resources in the private sector across all our partners, to help make sure those things can be accessed and deployed in the way that they are most needed, without getting in the way of what the public sector is doing,” he said.
Ohtaki got all those gears turning when Super Bowl 50 came to the region in February, bringing with it two weeks of frenetic activity in and around the San Francisco Bay Area.
“We had to make sure that our employees could get in and out of work safely, that they were well prepared and knew what was going on,” he said. Teaming with multiple municipalities as well as authorities from transit, public works and elsewhere, Ohtaki generated a steady stream of information around the event. “Many of these activities took place during work hours and we wanted people to be knowledgeable about the resources that were available to them.”
A former councilmember and mayor of Menlo Park, Calif., Ohtaki chaired the California Resiliency Alliance before joining Wells Fargo. Other members of the bank’s emergency management cadre come directly from the first responder world, some with nearly 30 years’ experience in police and fire work.
That hands-on background can be a valuable asset in translating corporate emergency priorities into tangible action.
“Because they have experience as first responders, they bring that special expertise to the table. They understand how it all works and especially where to find the resources,” said Terzich. As disaster professionals, they know where to find the latest threat data and when to ring the alarm. They know how to keep employees safe, and just as important, how to keep them calm. “My team’s job is also to vet the information, to make sure we are not acting just because somebody tweeted something.
