Tracy Atkinson joins Citizens Financial's board, Toast cuts workers

February 16, 2024 6:19 PM

Ex-State Street exec joins Citizen Financial's board, payment software firm Toast will cut workers, Visa rolls out enhanced digital wallet tools and more in the weekly banking news roundup.

Citizens Bank Branches Ahead Of Earnings Figures

Michael Nagle/Bloomberg

Changes ahead for Citizens Financial’s board

Citizens Financial Group in Providence, Rhode Island, will add Tracy Atkinson, the former chief administrative officer of State Street Corp., to its board of directors, according to a press release. Atkinson will join Citizens' board on March 1 and serve on the audit committee, the release said. She held numerous roles at State Street, including chief compliance officer and head of operational risk. Meanwhile, current Citizens Financial board member Edward (Ned) Kelly III will succeed Shivan Subramaniam as lead independent director of the board, the release said. Subramaniam, who joined the group in 2005, has reached mandatory retirement age under the company's corporate governance rules and plans to retire from the board when his term expires at the annual shareholder meeting in April, the release said. Kelly has been on the board since 2019. — Allissa Kline

Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg

Visa enhances digital wallet tools for commercial payments

Global card network Visa has rolled out new capabilities for Visa Commercial Pay, its business-to-business virtual payments platform that launched in 2020 in partnership with Conferma Pay. The enhancement enables banks to add virtual corporate cards to employees' digital wallets, including Apple Pay and Google Pay, to improve convenience. The transactions are tokenized for security and configured to all controls for in-store and online payments. Regions Bank, the $152 billion-asset institution based in Birmingham, Ala., will be first to access the new features by extending them to its treasury management customers. In addition to North America, Visa Commercial Pay is available in Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and later this year Visa plans to extend it to customers in Latin America and the Caribbean. —Kate Fitzgerald

roundup slide re: his appointment as Brown U's head of board of trustees

Hollie Adams/Bloomberg

BofA’s Moynihan to head Brown University’s board of Trustees

Brian Moynihan, CEO of Bank of America, will become Brown University's chairman of its board of trustees in July.

A 1981 graduate of the Ivy League school, Moynihan is a longtime trustee. He'll become chancellor, a volunteer role that leads the 54-member Brown Corp., the school said Tuesday.

"It is an honor to serve Brown, the fellows and trustees, and especially the dedicated faculty, students, staff and alumni," Moynihan said in a statement.

Brown's chancellor serves as one of four appointed officers, along with the vice chancellor, treasurer and secretary. The corporation helps select the school's president, approve faculty appointments and set the budget. — Janet Lorin and Katherine Doherty, Bloomberg News

Payment software firm Toast to cut 550 workers

Toast, a restaurant-focused payment software company, will cut about 550 employees, adding to the spate of technology industry workforce reductions since the start of 2024.

The job cuts are designed to promote "operating expense efficiency," the company said Thursday in its fourth-quarter earnings statement. Bloomberg earlier reported Toast's plan to eliminate positions. The company will incur about $50 million in costs such as severance, it added. Affected employees were told Thursday, according to a person familiar with the cuts, who asked not to be identified because that information wasn't public.

Known for processing payments for restaurants, Toast went public in September 2021. Its shares have plunged 52% since then amid slowdowns in the food industry and competition from companies like Block. Toast generated 2023 annual revenue of $3.87 billion, a 42% increase from a year earlier. The company employed 4,500 workers as of the end of 2022, according to regulatory filings.

The shares declined 4.7% to $19.20 on news of the workforce reduction. In extended trading, the stock jumped more than 8% on the earnings report, with Toast projecting 2024 adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization of about $210 million. Analysts, on average, estimated $170 million, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. —Brody Ford, Bloomberg News

JPMorgan to pay over $350 million for trade-reporting lapses

JPMorgan expects to pay more than $350 million to settle regulatory claims that it failed to feed information on trades into market-surveillance systems.

The biggest U.S. bank will pay about that much to two U.S. watchdogs and is in advanced talks with a third, the company said Friday in an annual filing.

"The firm self-identified that certain trading and order data through the CIB was not feeding into its trade-surveillance platforms," JPMorgan said, referring to its commercial and investment bank. "The firm does not expect any disruption of service to clients as a result of these resolutions."

The bank said in November it was cooperating with investigations into whether the firm had provided complete trading and order data as required and that some authorities had proposed penalties.

While the lapses affected only a fraction of the division's total activity, the amount of data tied to one venue was "significant," the bank said in the latest filing. It hasn't identified any employee misconduct or any harm to clients or the market. It already bolstered its controls and is almost done reviewing the data that wasn't initially screened.

The bank warned that it faces "actual and threatened litigation in Russia seeking payments on transactions that the firm cannot make, and is contractually excused from paying, under relevant sanctions laws." The lender said that assets it holds in that country could be seized as a result. — Hannah Levitt, Bloomberg News