Wells Fargo Faces Persistent Racial Gap in Mortgage Refinancing
- New data show the bank accepted more Black borrowers in 2021
- Still, it had the biggest racial disparity among major lenders
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Wells Fargo & Co., which approved fewer than half of mortgage refinancings sought by Black homeowners in 2020, prompting calls for regulatory investigations, greenlighted a larger share of applications from such borrowers last year.
But the gap between the bank’s approval rates of Black and White applicants in the second year of a $5 trillion pandemic refinancing boom remained greater than that of any other major lender, according to a Bloomberg News analysis of new federal mortgage data.