Not two, but rather three of the ten members of the Laurentian Bank management committee have left the financial institution in recent weeks, taking into account the unannounced departure of the technology manager.
The bank announced in mid-September the departure of its head of personal banking services, Karine Abgrall-Teslyk, and that of Yves Denommé, who was head of the bank’s operations sector.
The head of technology and information, Beel Yaqub, however, left two weeks earlier at the end of August without his departure being publicly announced.
Beel Yaqub’s responsibilities included modernizing the bank’s information systems and network infrastructure, cybersecurity, data management, implementing cloud technologies and managing technology providers. .
Beel Yaqub’s departure means the bank handled last week’s online banking IT outage with an interim chief technology and information officer.
An internal communication from CEO Rania Llewellyn sent to employees in early September indicates that Beel Yaqub left the bank for personal reasons and that the interim role was given to Badih Schoueri, who served as senior vice president of engineering for platforms.
Since this month, the bank’s management committee has had seven members instead of ten.
The outage that began last weekend and continued throughout the week was attributed to an internal glitch that occurred during a routine systems update.
Management said online banking services were restored as of midday Thursday, but it is possible that completing transactions may take longer than usual in the short term due to the volume of requests on the network. Customers were still complaining, among other things, on Friday about missing deposits from their accounts.
The outage notably affected fund transfers, deposits and online bill payments this week. For a while, operations carried out at ATMs were possible on a limited basis, that is, to withdraw money only.
The bank had announced on September 14 the departure of two members of the executive committee at the same time as it indicated that it had completed the strategic review exercise of its activities and that it considered that the best path forward to maximize the value for its shareholders is to accelerate the evolution of its current strategic plan.
The sale was considered during the process, but according to information obtained by La Presse, the proposals received were not considered advantageous for shareholders.