Laurentian Bank appoints new CEO following computer outage

globalnews.ca:

Laurentian Bank announced the appointment of Eric Provost as president and chief executive on Monday, following a computer outage at the bank last week.

Provost replaces Rania Llewellyn in the top job, effective immediately. He was most recently Laurentian’s group head of personal and commercial banking.

The bank also said director Michael Boychuk has been appointed chair of its board of directors, replacing Michael Mueller, who has resigned from the board.

“We have experienced challenges recently and the board is confident that Eric will successfully focus the organization on our customer experience and operational effectiveness,” Boychuk said in a statement.

“Eric’s appointment as CEO follows his exceptional performance leading our commercial banking business and was part of our formal succession planning process.”

Laurentian said it suffered a mainframe outage last week during a planned IT maintenance update. It said customer data and financial information remained secure at all times.

The bank said Provost’s immediate priority will be to rebuild trust with the bank’s customers and address the impacts of the outage.

“Once the issues related to the outage are fully behind us, we will develop a new plan to ensure the sustained success of our bank,” Provost said.

“We will focus our efforts on renewing the trust of loyal customers while continuing our efforts to drive greater operational efficiency and growth in all our business lines.”

As an initial step, the bank said it will reverse all monthly service fees for September as soon as possible.

Last month, Laurentian completed its review of strategic options without a deal to sell the bank.

A strategic review is often seen by investors as a prelude to a sale by a company.