Victor Dodig has been chief executive officer at CIBC for 11 years. His departure was widely expected and will take place after a year when CIBC’s stock posted the best performance among the Big Six banks.Justin Tang/The Canadian Press
Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce CEO Victor Dodig will retire at the end of October and hand the top job to Harry Culham, head of the bank’s capital-markets business.
Mr. Dodig has been chief executive officer at CIBC CM-T for 11 years. He rebuilt the bank’s balance sheet, did the largest acquisition in CIBC’s history by acquiring a Chicago-based lender for $4.9-billion and expanded the domestic retail platform. His departure was widely expected and will take place after a year when CIBC’s stock posted the best performance among the Big Six banks.
“This felt like the right time, with the right leadership team and the right captain ready to take over,” Mr. Dodig said in an interview.
“The bank is on a trajectory to do much more.”
Mr. Dodig turns 60 this year, which he said was a factor in his decision to step down. He started at CIBC in 1985 as a teller, while attending the University of Toronto, then earned an MBA from Harvard University and worked at McKinsey, Merrill Lynch and UBS before rejoining the Toronto-based bank in 2005.
“Victor’s tenure as president and CEO has been marked by a relentless focus on the client and an unwavering commitment to transforming CIBC,” Kate Stevenson, chair of the CIBC board, said in a press release.
Mr. Culham will become chief operating officer April 1, then succeed Mr. Dodig as CEO on Oct. 31, the bank’s fiscal year-end. Mr. Dodig will remain at CIBC as senior adviser to the board and new CEO until the end of April, 2026.
Mr. Culham emerged as the winner of a three-horse race that played out smoothly and publicly over the past year, a contrast to previous CIBC succession battles that led to the losing candidate departing abruptly. The other CEO candidates, head of Canadian retail banking Hratch Panossian and Shawn Beber, who runs CIBC Bank USA, are expected to remain in their roles.
“Our strategy is working, it’s one of connectivity across the bank,” Mr. Culham said. “It’s a strategy around helping clients achieve their ambitions, and when you look out five or 10 years, the strategy won’t be a whole lot different.”
CIBC’s board signalled that Mr. Culham was the leading contender last March by giving the former currency-trading trainee additional responsibilities for the bank’s strategy, its asset-management business and as head of its Caribbean division.
CIBC is the country’s fifth-largest bank, with 48,000 employees. Over the past decade, the bank expanded the services it offers middle-class customers with moves that included acquiring Costco’s Canadian credit-card business, with more than $3-billion in assets, in 2021.
In 2017, CIBC launched a digital-banking platform called Simplii Financial. On Tuesday, Ms. Stevenson said Simplii is part of Mr. Dodig’s legacy of “transformative investments in digital banking and technology.”
CIBC is the third major Canadian bank to name a new CEO in the past three years, and made the transition with far less drama than rivals.
In 2022, Bank of Nova Scotia broke with tradition by bringing in an outside executive, former Finning International CEO Scott Thomson, as its new leader. Last year, Toronto-Dominion Bank announced that Ray Chun would take the top job, then moved up his start date as the lender dealt with the fallout from failures in its U.S. anti-money-laundering systems.
Mr. Culham started his career in finance in 1989 as a trainee from the University of British Columbia, working on CIBC’s foreign-exchange desk. He went on to work in fixed income, commodities and currency businesses at UBS in Asia, then in London as a senior executive at Dresdner Bank AG and Merrill Lynch. He rejoined CIBC in 2008 and took the reins at its capital-markets division three years later.
Mr. Culham will continue to be the head of that division while serving as the bank’s chief operating officer.
Mr. Dodig will retire from CIBC with a holding in the bank valued at $50.7-million on Oct. 31, 2024, the end of the bank’s most recent fiscal year. In 2024, Mr. Dodig made $13.6-million in total compensation, up from $11.2-million the previous year.
CIBC paid Mr. Culham $10.3-million last year, up from $8.4-million in 2023.
With Mr. Dodig’s pending retirement, Royal Bank of Canada’s Dave McKay is the longest-serving bank CEO in Canada. He has been head of the country’s largest bank since 2014.
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to state that Victor Dodig rejoined CIBC in 2005.