This email was sent to all CBB employees.
Within Consumer and Business Banking (CBB), we’re all working toward a common goal: becoming central to the financial lives of our customers to power their potential. To achieve this, we embarked on a journey together 18 months ago, which began with the adoption of a new, market-centric approach to ensure we’re best positioned to deliver a one U.S. Bank experience to all our customers. And, a year ago, we further refined the ways we serve and engage with customers to more proactively build connections and deepen relationships.
Throughout this journey, one thing has remained constant – our customers’ preferences are ever-changing, and we’ve only seen these shifts accelerate with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. In March, we paused work on many of our strategic initiatives and priorities. This allowed us to observe and assess how we can best support and address the needs of our customers while also adapting to our current environment and positioning ourselves for a successful future.
Last week, we began the next phase of our journey with the announcement that we would resume efforts to optimize our physical footprint and distribution model. We’ll also resume our reinvestment projects and enhance our efforts to integrate digital capabilities more fully into our customers’ banking experience.
Our journey continues today with updates I’d like to share around additional steps we’re taking to best position ourselves to support and serve our customers now and into the future.
Updates in Community Banking
Throughout our collective journey, one of our long-term goals has been to create a dynamic Community Banking strategy to ensure close alignment with the broader CBB strategy. Over the past year, I’ve had many conversations with Mark Jorgenson, our head of Community Banking, and his leadership team about the changes needed to do that. As a result of these discussions and much careful consideration, we’re moving forward with Mark’s recommendation that we streamline the Community Banking operating model and consolidate our current divisional structure, going from six to three divisions to create more consistency across our footprint. In this new structure:
• Bill Jones will continue to lead the East Central and Lower Midwest Divisions as the newly named Community East Division.
• Liesl Schmidt will lead the Community West Division, which will consist of the current Pacific West, Idaho-Washington Division and the Mountain States Divisions.
• Bob Weiss will lead the North Central and Central Divisions, which will now be known simply as the Community Central Division.
I would also like to share the bittersweet news that after more than 39 years with U.S. Bank, Mark Jorgenson has shared his plans to retire. Mark is a brilliant leader who has developed and run a world-class Community Banking team. We’re fortunate that he’ll remain on board through the end of the year to guide us through many of the changes he recommended to create consistency across our footprint. Mark currently serves on six nonprofit charitable and civic boards in the Kansas City region and will continue to remain active in community affairs after his retirement.
With Mark’s departure, we won't have a single head of Community Banking and Bill, Liesl and Bob will now report directly to me. Jim Grigsby, Mark Januschka and Ryan K–lgore will continue to partner with the newly appointed division managers into mid-November to assist with this transition. These leaders have been with U.S. Bank for 38, 33 and 41 years, respectively, and their leadership and contributions have been invaluable. I hope you’ll join me in thanking them for their service and wishing them all the best.
With these changes, and to further ensure a one U.S. Bank experience for our customers, Heather Fitzmorris and the Community Wealth group will begin reporting to Mark Jordahl in Wealth Management and Investment Services while continuing to work very closely with the new divisions as they have for many years. In addition, Rob Teach and the Community Credit team will now report to David Little, who leads our CBB Operations group, and Janet Jones, Mark’s administrative assistant, will report directly to Rob.
An enhanced focus on Business Banking
Over the past several months, the needs of our small business customers have been front and center. The recent emphasis on this segment has reminded us of the important role we play in the lives of these customers and the impact they have on our business.