Consumer complaint received 2023-03-15
Company: WELLS FARGO & COMPANY
State: DC
Product: Mortgage
Sub-product: Conventional home mortgage
Issue: Trouble during payment process

Complaint:
Wells Fargo 's websites are chronically, for many months, unable to accept electronic payments, nor to establish autopayments, nor to reliably maintain autopayments, resulting in them harvesting additional and unjustifiable late fees. While all banks have occasional technical outages, I believe that Wells shows a pattern of deliberate negligence in the operation of their websites, as this results in additional fee revenue when customers are unable to make payments quickly and conveniently. This pattern of behavior appears to me to be years-long. 

As just the latest example : XXXX XXXX  XX/XX/XXXX, when attempting to make a one-time payment at XXXX XXXX, the website says " We are unable to process this request at this time. Please try again later or call XXXX ''. This is certainly not a time in which Wells would be performing routine maintenance on the website. 

This is a recurring pattern since at least XXXX XXXX. At that time, I needed to change the bank accounts from which I make my mortgage payments to Wells Fargo. So, I cancelled my existing autopay order, and attempted to make a new one. The website was unable/unwilling to accept a new one at that time, so I was forced to make a 1-time payment. I then made multiple followup attempts to restore auto-payment, at which times the system was also unavailable. 

I believe that I eventually successfully created an autopay on my account, but of course did not document this activity, never expecting it to be a problem months later. My XXXX mortgage payment shows in my banking records as an 'autopay ' from Wells Fargo . If it was not actually an autopay, it was the second month in a row where I was forced to make manual payment, but I do not believe this to be the case. I know that I closed a documented To-Do about re-establishing autopay, believing it to be finished. However, no subsequent monthly payments were made, resulting in a late fee. 

Today, the website does allow creation of autopays again... but is unsurprisingly now unable to accept 1-time payments. This forced me to call and speak to a service agent to catch up my account, which many people will not find the time to do. There's always _something_ broken on the Wells Fargo website , something which will later generate unearned interest and late fees. 

Given Wells Fargo 's massive size and resources, and this being XXXX not XXXX, a service for reliable web mortgage payments is a trivial capability for a bank to operate. Wells Fargo 's failure to enable these payments reliably seems to fit into their long-term pattern of predatory, fee-seeking behavior, for which they have been repeatedly fined Billions of dollars. I would suggest that CFPB investigate how frequently and for what reasons WF 's digital payment systems have been offline, and how much interest and late fee revenue this has generated for WF.

Company public response: Company has responded to the consumer and the CFPB and chooses not to provide a public response
Company response to consumer: Closed with explanation