Laurentian Bank of Canada, which has been working on a turnaround under a new chief executive officer since late 2020, has started a strategic review that may lead to a sale.
The review is intended to "maximize shareholder and stakeholder value," the bank said Tuesday. It has hired JPMorgan Chase to approach potential buyers, La Presse and the Globe and Mail separately reported Tuesday. The process started after a rival bank made a bid for Laurentian, the Globe said, citing people it didn't name.
Laurentian hired former Bank of Nova Scotia executive Rania Llewellyn as CEO in October 2020, becoming the first publicly traded Canadian bank to be led by a woman. The firm is Canada's eighth-largest bank by total assets, according to data compiled by Bloomberg, and has a market capitalization of about C$1.5 billion ($1.1 billion).
"While the review is underway, the management team remains committed to executing on the bank's strategy and fiscal 2023 priorities of delivering excellent customer service, a focus on deposits and optimizing its funding structure," the Montreal-based lender said in a statement.
For Canada's larger banks, a takeover of Laurentian would offer a rare shot at expansion by acquisition in the French-speaking province of Quebec. The Canadian government has rejected major domestic bank mergers in recent decades, but Laurentian is much smaller than the six large lenders that dominate the country's banking industry.
Many of Canada's Big Six banks are sitting on significant stockpiles of capital after an anticipated wave of pandemic-related defaults did not materialize, and some are using it for deals. Royal Bank of Canada, the country's largest lender, is working to close its C$13.5 billion acquisition of HSBC's Canadian unit. Bank of Montreal earlier this year completed a $16.3 billion purchase of BNP Paribas' Bank of the West to expand in the US.
Llewellyn took the helm at Laurentian after the previous CEO stepped down following a five-year tenure that included an incomplete transformation and woes, including customer misrepresentations on mortgages that it sold to another firm.
Llewellyn has worked to improve the bank's operations, for example by speeding up mortgage originations, and to fill gaps in its product line by introducing a mobile-banking app and tap payments on its debit cards. The shares are up 28% since she became CEO, sixth place out of the nine banks in the S&P/TSX Commercial Banks Index. The stock had dropped 51% in the five years before she took over, the worst performance in the index.
