Laurentian Bank of Canada said Chief Executive Officer Rania Llewellyn will leave immediately, to be replaced by personal and commercial banking chief Eric Provost. The bank’s chairman resigned.
(Bloomberg) — Laurentian Bank of Canada said Chief Executive Officer Rania Llewellyn will leave immediately, to be replaced by personal and commercial banking chief Eric Provost. The bank’s chairman resigned.
The announcement brings a sudden and surprising end to the tenure of Llewellyn, the first woman to lead a major domestic bank in Canada. It comes weeks after the Montreal-based lender concluded a review of strategic options without finding a buyer. The bank said at the time it will try to ramp up its current strategy, which includes growth in commercial lending and technology upgrades.
Provost’s priority will be to “rebuild trust” with customers and address the impact of a mainframe outage that occurred last week, according to a statement from the bank. The IT failure, which affected customer deposits, bill payments and other services, occurred during a planned technology maintenance update, the bank said, adding that customer data and financial information remained secure at all times.
“Eric is the right executive to lead the bank at this critical point in its evolution,” said Michael Boychuk, who was appointed chair of the board as previous chairman Michael Mueller quit. “We have experienced challenges recently and the board is confident that Eric will successfully focus the organization on our customer experience and operational effectiveness.”
The shares have fallen more than 15% since the Sept. 14 announcement that the strategic review had ended without a deal.
Provost will implement a three-part plan to fully resolve any outstanding issues related to the outage, enhance communications with customers and launch a review of the technical issues.
Provost had been promoted to an expanded role last month by Llewellyn, adding personal banking to his responsibilities in a management shakeup that also saw Laurentian adopt a smaller executive team.
Llewellyn, a former Bank of Nova Scotia executive, was CEO for almost three years.
(Updates with recent share price change in fifth paragraph. An earlier version corrected spelling of Provost’s name in penultimate paragraph.)
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