Laurentian Bank has entrusted a Quebecer with the task of regaining customer trust.
The current head of business and personal banking services, Éric Provost, takes over from Rania Llewellyn at the helm of the Quebec financial institution.
Éric Provost’s immediate priority is to rebuild trust with customers and deal with the consequences of the central system outage that occurred last week.
Initially, the bank will waive all monthly banking fees for the month of September. Customers will see a credit on their account in the coming days.
And although Monday is a federal holiday (National Day for Truth and Reconciliation), several Laurentian Bank branches will be open to serve customers. Branch opening hours will be extended throughout the week.
The bank explained that the outage occurred during a planned IT maintenance operation.
A new president is also appointed to head the board of directors. Michael Boychuk, a director at the bank for 10 years, replaces Michael Mueller.
Éric Provost has worked at the Bank for over 10 years. “Eric is the ideal executive to lead the bank at this critical stage in its evolution,” Michael Boychuk said in a press release.
“We have experienced challenges recently and the board is confident that Eric will refocus the organization on customer experience and operational efficiency. Eric’s appointment as President and CEO follows his exceptional performance leading our business services and is part of our formal succession planning process. »
Éric Provost will implement a three-part action plan to ensure the bank resolves all outstanding issues related to the outage as soon as possible, to significantly improve communications with customers to ensure they are promptly informed of full restoration of services, and to initiate a thorough review of the factors leading to the outage.
“Once the issues surrounding the outage are fully resolved, we will develop a new plan to ensure the continued success of our bank. We will focus our efforts on regaining the trust of our loyal customers while continuing our actions to increase operational efficiency and growth in all our sectors of activity,” indicates Éric Provost in a press release.
“Laurentian Bank has undertaken a significant modernization of its digital tools and the IT outage clearly appears to be a significant problem for clients to require such a sudden change in management, if of course this is indeed the only reason having led to changes,” comments analyst Darko Mihelic at RBC.
His colleague Mike Rizvanovic, from the Keefe, Bruyette firm
Éric Provost added personal banking services to his responsibilities in mid-September following the departure of Karine Abgrall-Teslyk.
The departure of the head of the bank’s operations sector, Yves Denommé, was also announced two weeks ago.
The head of technology and information, Beel Yaqub, left the bank at the end of August.
The bank also indicated last month that it had completed the strategic review exercise of its activities and that it considered that the best path forward to maximize 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 the bank’s shareholders.
