CIBC names Harry Culham to succeed Victor Dodig as CEO

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Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce appointed Harry Culham to succeed chief govt Victor Dodig, who will retire in November after main the nation’s fifth-largest lender for greater than a decade.

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Culham, a former intern in CIBC’s Vancouver workplace who now leads its capital-markets arm, will change into chief working officer on April 1, the financial institution mentioned Thursday in an announcement. After handing the reins to Culham on Nov. 1, Dodig will stay as an adviser to the brand new CEO and the board by way of April 2026.

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Dodig, 59, who invested in expertise upgrades and spent years reworking the financial institution to focus extra on shopper relationships, mentioned it’s by no means the right time to go away.

“At a private degree, by the tip of this, it’ll be greater than 11 years,” he mentioned in an interview. “We’re actually coming into our personal by way of what’s been achieved.”

The transition will cap greater than twenty years on the financial institution for Dodig, who turned CEO in 2014. And after weathering years of investor frustration over its underperforming inventory, amid issues over CIBC’s publicity to United States workplace loans, his pending departure comes at a relative excessive level.

CIBC has labored by way of the credit score woes, stored a good grip on bills, focused rich Canadian shoppers and centered on personal firms south of the border. Its inventory had been on a tear, returning greater than 50 per cent within the 12 months by way of January, earlier than US President Donald Trump’s commerce warfare upended world markets. The shares have dropped 12 per cent since.

“When you’re within the seat right here as captain for over a decade, you don’t cling on to the position,” Dodig mentioned. “It feels nice as a result of Harry’s an ideal companion.”

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Culham, who has been a part of the financial institution’s govt workforce since 2015, mentioned he doesn’t foresee making any “main pivots” when he takes over.

“There’s much more upside on the execution of our technique,” he mentioned within the interview, noting that he has already been main enterprise technique and company improvement for a number of years.

Culham is one among a number of CIBC executives who had been deemed potential CEO contenders because the financial institution has shuffled its prime leaders over the previous 12 months and a half, strikes it mentioned had been supposed to offer senior managers new expertise. Culham himself added oversight of world asset administration to his purview in September.

After collaborating in one among CIBC’s first graduate packages, Culham went on to different banking roles in Europe and Asia. He rejoined the Canadian financial institution in 2008 and took over as head of the capital-markets division in 2015. He additionally oversees its Caribbean enterprise.

During Dodig’s tenure, CIBC acquired Costco Wholesale Corp.’s Canadian credit-card portfolio, constructed a brand new workplace tower for its downtown Toronto headquarters and acquired Chicago-based PrivateBancorp Inc. in 2017.

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The agency now generates about 20 per cent of its revenue within the U.S., Dodig mentioned, up from lower than 2 per cent a decade in the past, but it surely’s centered on wealth administration and business lending, reasonably than a broad-based retail banking technique. That contrasts with rival Toronto-Dominion Bank, which is the Tenth-largest lender within the US however now faces development restrictions after its anti-money-laundering settlement.

Dodig began his profession as a CIBC financial institution teller in 1985, he mentioned. He, too, left the financial institution for a few years — he was a administration marketing consultant at McKinsey & Co. and in addition labored for UBS Group AG and Merrill Lynch — earlier than rejoining CIBC in 2008.

Bloomberg.com

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