City National Bank said Howard Hammond will succeed Kelly Coffey as its new chief executive officer, just six weeks after the lender’s parent Royal Bank of Canada pumped money into the US firm to shore up its liquidity.
Hammond joins from Fifth Third Bancorp where he was most recently executive vice president and head of consumer banking, according to an emailed statement Friday. Coffey, who has led the firm since 2019, will stay on in a newly created role of CEO of City National Entertainment. The changes take effect Nov. 27.
Just weeks before Friday’s news, Royal Bank injected capital into the division in what KBW analysts Mike Rizvanovic and Abhilash Shashidharan dubbed an “internal bailout.” Regulatory filings later revealed Royal Bank made a capital contribution of almost $2 billion. It also purchased debt securities with unrealized losses in an effort to help City National clean up its balance sheet.
Read More: RBC Injected $2.95 Billion into City National This Year
Hammond will report to Greg Carmichael, who was named executive chair of the Los Angeles-based City National’s board in September and reports directly to Royal Bank CEO Dave McKay. He is also a former CEO of Cincinnati-based Fifth Third.
In March, Carmichael was appointed the CEO of Signature Bridge Bank, which was established after New York-based Signature Bank collapsed into Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. receivership amid the regional banking turmoil. Signature’s deposits and some of its loans were then taken over by a unit of New York Community Bancorp.
Capital Injections
Royal Bank bought City National in 2015 for $5 billion and has since injected capital into its subsidiary on several occasions. The California bank, with $96 billion of assets, offers banking, investment and trust services in Southern California, the San Francisco Bay area, New York, Miami and other cities.
Over the past year, Royal Bank reported $229 million in adjusted net income from City National Bank, including a loss of $12 million in the Canadian bank’s fiscal third quarter, ended July 31.
Hammond’s experience at Fifth Third “reflects operational excellence, strong risk management, and the ability to transform an organization for the future,” Carmichael said in the statement. “He is the ideal leader to take City National to its next stage and prepare the bank for future success.”
Coffey, who in September was named the eighth-most powerful woman in banking by American Banker, was the first woman to lead City National — often called the “bank to the stars” because of its ties to Hollywood and the entertainment industry. She previously worked for five years as CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s US private-banking unit.
Coffey, in her new position, “will build on City National’s 70-year legacy of supporting the entertainment community and allow her to focus her significant talents on helping our entertainment clients thrive,” Carmichael said in the statement.
(Updates with further details throughout.)
