DBRS Assigns an ‘A’ rating to Wells Fargo & Company’s Preferred Stock; Trend Stable

DBRS has today assigned a rating of ‘A’ with a Stable trend to Wells Fargo & Company’s (Wells Fargo or the Company) $675 million issuance (with a $75 million over-allotment option) of Non-cumulative Perpetual Preferred Stock. The ratings are positioned three notches below Wells Fargo’s Issuer & Senior Debt rating of AA, which also carries a Stable trend. This notching is consistent with DBRS’s base notching policy for preferred shares issued for AA rated entities.

Notes: All figures are in U.S. dollars unless otherwise noted.

The principal applicable methodologies are Rating Bank Preferred Shares and Equivalent Hybrids. Other methodologies used include Global Methodology for Rating Banks and Banking Organizations and the DBRS Criteria – Intrinsic and Support Assessments. Both can be found on the DBRS website under Methodologies.

The sources of information used for this rating include company documents, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and SNL Financial. DBRS considers the information available to it for the purposes of providing this rating was of satisfactory quality.

This rating is endorsed by DBRS Ratings Limited for use in the European Union.

Lead Analyst: William Schwartz
Rating Committee Chair: Alan G. Reid
Initial Rating Date: 10 December 1999
Most Recent Rating Update: 01 June 2012

For additional information on this rating, please refer to the linking document under Related Research.