Owens Is Out As Head of Commercial Banking at TD

Walter J. Owens, the head of TD Bank's corporate and specialty lending, has left the company as part of an internal restructuring, a bank spokeswoman said on Friday.

[* This article has been updated on Friday to include a new statement from TD Bank.]

American Banker on Thursday reported that Owens had been dismissed last week, with no official reason given, according to an industry source familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the matter.

"We recently announced internally a company-wide reorganization of our U.S. commercial banking business. As part of that reorganization, Walter Owens will be leaving the company to pursue other opportunities," TD Bank spokeswoman Jennifer Morneau said in an emailed statement on Friday.

He has been replaced by Gregory Braca, previously TD Bank's regional president for the metropolitan New York region and head of healthcare banking, Morneau said in her email.

Owens had become an increasingly visible executive for TD, appearing on Bloomberg Television in May to lay out the bank's plans for expanding its U.S. commercial banking. He gave an interview to ABF Journal around the same time, telling the trade publication, "My vision is we can be a dominant player in the upper middle market and lower corporate spaces in the next three to five years."

The bank hired Owens in 2008 to oversee a vast array of specialized banking operations, including commercial real estate, corporate banking, and specialty banking including asset-based finance, auto finance, equipment leasing and healthcare finance.

Owens, a veteran executive of specialized financial services companies, was previously the president of corporate finance at CIT Group Inc. Before joining the lender, he held several roles at General Electric Co., including the position of chief marketing officer at GE Commercial Finance.

Owens did not respond to an emailed request for comment sent through his LinkedIn account on Thursday morning; other attempts to reach him were unsuccessful.

His replacement has a longer tenure at what became TD Bank's U.S. operations. Braca joined Commerce Bancorp Inc. in 2002, and survived Toronto-Dominion's takeover of the bank in 2008.

Toronto-Dominion Bank has continued expanding aggressively through deals since then, including its purchase last year of auto lender Chrysler Financial. Canada's second-biggest bank now has more branches in the United States than in its home country.