The Wells Fargo scandal matters if you are a financial advisor.

You may not work for Wells or have an account there and the same may be true for all your customers. But the ripple effects from the scandal could reach your doorstep.

There was a palpable fear by members of both political parties at Senate and House hearings last month that the Wells Fargo “meet these sales quotas or else” corporate culture is widespread in the financial services industry.

Nearly 5,300 people were let go for creating over 2 million phony bank and credit card accounts. Wells has refused to say how many workers were fired for failing to meet the improper push to sell as many financial products as possible to individual customers.

Memories fade but the improper sales practices in the mortgage industry that cost millions their homes and their jobs in the financial crisis eight years still resonates.

Here are some possible outcomes if Congressional, regulatory and media investigators find that Wells is not a one-off and many financial services companies have a disease-reaching fever of multiple account or other unethical pressures on clients and workers:

• More pressure to end mandatory arbitration clauses in financial services contracts. Senators and Representatives were clearly perturbed when Wells Chair and CEO John Stumpf told them the company would invoke those prenuptial agreements between his bank and defrauded customers from going to court.

Look for an end to mandatory arbitration to be front and center on the Senate Banking Committee’s agenda if the Democrats win control of the Senate next month.

• Fewer job-threatening quotas for sales of weak products, particularly proprietary offerings. Financial services executives are looking at them intensely for bad incentives practices. For individual advisors, this could lead to less pressure as bosses do more to make Stumpf’s unbelievable “we don’t have quotas, we have goals” believable in their own firms.

Could the Securities and Exchange Commission be launching an across-the-board probe into potential harmful sales practices and pressures among broker-dealers and registered investment advisors? Probably.

When SEC Chair Mary Jo White was asked if this was happening, her answer was “no comment.”

The open refusal of a regulatory or enforcement agency head to say if a probe is being conducted on a hot issue is generally a sign one is under way.

White’s statement came one day after one senator, Oregon’s Jeff Merkley, asked her to start an investigation. More have publicly urged her.

Could SEC examiners about to come to your office be more focused on “improper sales incentives” because they have consumed a steady stream of media reports on the scandal?

One former regulator has said sales incentives cross the line when they morph from the carrot of a trip to Hawaii to the stick of the loss of a job.

At the same time, someone else said why put the onus on financial services when high-pressure sales pitches to buy the store are common from everything from car repair shops to clothing boutiques?

A higher wattage spotlight is warranted on advisors because you matter. A crowded closet is probably the biggest harm that could come to a customer who succumbs to the “buy this and this and this” overtures of a dress clerk under undue stress to save her job.

Depleted savings for retirement, a down payment on a home and their kids’ education are proven dangers to a client is sold too many and too ill-suited financial products by an advisor scare of losing his job is pressured by management whose zealousness has reached rule breaking and law breaking.

Ted Knutson is Financial Advisor's Washington correspondent.