WELLS FARGO & COMPANY/MN

Wells Fargo & Company was founded in 1852 by Henry Wells and William Fargo. The company dealt with currency at its onset, offering banking for god and paper drafts and the express delivery of valuables. Its business was always done through the fastest means possible, meaning it evolved with the times to go from stagecoach to railroad to telegraph. By 1910, its network spanned 6000 locations and, by 1918, it would link over 10,000 communities across the country. The bank portion of the company separated in 1905, expanding from one single office in San Francisco to become a northern California regional bank by the 1960s. By the 1990s, Wells Fargo would have expanded to cover many locations all over the country. The current Wells Fargo was created in a merger between the Norwest Corporation and the Original Wells Fargo in 1998. Although the acquisition belonged to Norwest, the company would keep the Wells Fargo name and San Francisco headquarters in order to utilize their nationally recognized history. In 2008, the bank would acquire Wachovia, one of the many companies in its series of acquisitions from 2007 to 2012, for $14.8 billion, beating out Citigroup’s offer of $2.1 billion. Today Wells Fargo & Company acts as a holding company, acting as the fourth largest bank in the United States on the basis of assets. In 2007 it managed to acquire the coveted AAA rating by S&P, becoming the only bank in the United States to do so. Wells Fargo operates under three segments: Community Banking, Wholesale Banking, and Wealth, Brokerage and Retirement. It currently has total assets of $1.7 trillion and is one of the “Big Four” in banking. Some of its most notable ETFs include the SPDR Wells Fargo Preferred and Financial Select Sector SPDR, and some of its notable mutual funds include Diversified International, Specialized Technology, and Money Market funds.