City National Bank cut about 100 employees this week, Bloomberg and Reuters reported Wednesday.
The job reductions come in addition to a 5% headcount trim the Los Angeles-based subsidiary of Royal Bank of Canada put in place during the quarter that ended Oct. 31.
“We regularly review our staffing plans and models to ensure they align with our strategic priorities and allow us to best serve our clients and communities,” spokesperson Diana Rodriguez told Bloomberg in an email. “As a result, we have made the difficult decision to eliminate a targeted number of roles in some parts of the business across City National’s footprint.”
The bank has been undergoing wide-scale change since September, hiring former Fifth Third CEO Greg Carmichael as executive chair and bringing aboard two other Fifth Third veterans to take posts in the C-suite.
City National hired Fifth Third’s head of consumer banking, Howard Hammond, to serve as its CEO and, days later, took the Cincinnati-based bank’s head of investor relations, Chris Doll, to run its finances. The first of those two moves pushed Kelly Coffey out of the CEO role and into a newly created position as CEO of City National Entertainment. Martha Henderson, City National’s vice chair of entertainment banking, retired Feb. 2.
City National is hardly alone in trimming its ranks. Since September, Citi, Truist, PNC, State Street, Wells Fargo, Ally, Citizens and Morgan Stanley, among U.S. banks, have all announced headcount reductions of 500 or more employees.
But City National has weathered money woes, too. RBC infused $2.95 billion into its U.S. subsidiary in 2023 to boost its capital, the Canadian bank said in November.
Meanwhile, City National has seen its share of penalties over the past year or so. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency fined the bank $65 million over gaps the regulator found in risk management and internal controls.
City National in January 2023 agreed to pay $31 million to the Justice Department to settle allegations the bank avoided providing mortgage lending services to majority-Black and Hispanic neighborhoods in Los Angeles County from 2017 through at least 2020.
