Kleber Santos is now solely responsible for the bank’s consumer banking and lending as Saul Van Beurden becomes wholly focused on AI.

Wells Fargo has named Kleber Santos the sole chief executive of its consumer banking and lending business as Saul Van Beurden, the former co-CEO of that segment, moves to a full-time artificial intelligence role, the bank announced Thursday.

Van Beurden was tapped to scale artificial intelligence at Wells last year. The bank has “significant opportunities to grow our consumer businesses and to use AI to transform how we operate and serve our customers,” CEO Charlie Scharf said in a prepared statement Thursday.

“Kleber and Saul have built strong momentum in both areas, and having each focus fully on these priorities will help us accelerate that progress,” he said.

Santos will take on full responsibility for consumer banking and lending, including consumer deposits, credit cards, business banking and auto lending. Van Beurden will focus, still, on scaling AI adoption enterprise-wide, including deepening Wells’ work with AI firms.

“We're devoting significant management time and resources to building AI capabilities and drive value,” Scharf said on Wells’ third-quarter earnings call Oct. 13.

“Over the past year, this has gone from being a tool to assist programmers to now being able to use autonomous agents when appropriate, to increase capacity and revenue from our branches, to launch marketing campaigns faster, to help identify as well as write and test code to close previously unknown cyber vulnerabilities and to improve and simplify risk management processes,” he said.

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