Cutbacks and plans at Laurentian Bank | General financial discussion | Discussion forum

http://www.theglobeandmail.com.....e32110758/

They are closing a third of their branches and losing a lot of staff jobs.

Either in this article or the one in FP, this was considered to be a very large cut by CIBC analyst.
Some of you may not know much about Laurentian, but they are fairly big in QC.

I note that they plan to boost profits by giving more "advice". This is the same idea that we have heard in recent times from other FIs. Meridian, for one, has named this as a future profit centre, as did DeutscheBank recently.
Does this not raise red flags for you? Those of us on this site who have utilized financial advisors appear to have found them a mixed blessing, to put it optimistically. A number of us have lost money under their auspices, and it's certainly not necessarily because they failed to hold their investments long enough. I know people who have lost money in Labour-sponsored funds, Bre-X, Nortel, to name a few, and that money is not recoverable. All were recommended by advisors. Many people have come out about even without using advisors.

I have looked at the market-linked GICs offered by Meridian, for starters, and they are terrible. Is this an example of the new advisor culture that we can expect? If so, not worth much, but I'm sure my contact person at Meridian would be happy to direct me to them. He has told me multiple times how he wants to help me with all my financial needs, which just makes me want to retreat.

This does not strike me as a viable future direction except inasmuch as they will no doubt be waging major advertising campaigns to convince us that this is worthwhile.

I can appreciate that the very wealthy really do need financial advice, as their situations are more complicated than most people can be expected to cope with. Those people already have financial advisors, manager, lawyers, etc. and could not possibly make up the needed market.
For the rest of us, it's a questionable proposition, especially if there is another event similar to 2008 (or, more likely IMO, an even more major event - simply because there is little "growth" anywhere and our economy is structured in such a way that this is essential fodder)
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I know there's a sucker born every minute, and a strong ad campaign will no doubt bring them forth. Still, this does not strike me as a solid way forward, considering that so many FIs seem to be pinning their prospects on it.
It used to be that a bank was a place that borrowed money from some people, paid them interest and loaned the money out to others at higher interest, pocketing the difference. This was a fairly clear relationship, and easy to understand. The bank's cut was based on their work in matching lenders and borrowers, with some kind of hard assets at play. But advice is not based on anything tangible, is highly variable, and its practitioners never take responsibility for its outcomes..

Getting back to Laurentian for a moment, is it just a coincidence that the CEO is named Desjardins?