Monday Gives Laurentian Bank’s Customers Their Money Back, Not Their Bank

At 4 p.m. on Friday, Laurentian Bank closed all 55 of its Quebec branches for good, and switched off the debit cards, the cash machines and the app with them.

From that hour, a Laurentian customer could not take cash from a Laurentian machine, pay with a Laurentian debit card, log in to LBCDirect, or reach the bank by phone. The Visa credit cards kept working. Everything else stopped, and it stays stopped until Monday. Laurentian’s own advice for the weekend, given in a statement, was that clients should “plan for an alternative method of payment over the weekend.” The bank was telling its customers to have another bank ready. Even customers who already bank with National Bank lose online banking for the weekend: National Bank’s business migration page says its online banking services will not be available during the migration weekend, and “this also applies to you if you’re already a National Bank client.”

Monday is when the money comes back: National Bank says all banking and debit card services “will be gradually restored” on Monday, November 9. It names no hour. And the page that says so is not a reassurance; it is a list of jobs. Transfers cancelled during the weekend have to be sent again. Autodeposit has to be set up again. Scheduled transactions have to be rebuilt. The page tells customers to check that their suppliers are correctly entered, and it caps the number that carries over at 20 — anyone with more adds the rest by hand. Laurentian contacts have to be added again as Interac e-Transfer recipients. Every employer, biller and payer that uses the old account number has to be given a new one, and the redirection that covers direct deposits, pre-authorized debits and cheques runs for six months. Incoming wires get three.

New cheques have to be ordered. The first hundred are free if ordered before February 28, 2027. Investment accounts get new numbers, and National Bank warns that not all assets will be visible at once: “It may take a few days to see the entire balance of your investment accounts.” No new transactions are permitted in those portfolios after the migration, redemptions only. And to pay the Laurentian Visa after November 8, the customer has to add “Laurentian Bank Visa” as a bill payee in the new online bank. None of this is a glitch. It is the migration as designed, written down on the bank’s own page, and it lands on the customer the morning the bank reopens.

The people who worked in those 55 branches are not part of the handover. The December 2025 announcement said it plainly: “None of the employees or retail branches of Laurentian Bank will be transferred to National Bank.” Laurentian, the announcement said, would be responsible for “terminating the employment of certain employees (or reassigning them to other lines of business or to Fairstone Bank or its affiliates)” before the deal closed. A proxy circular published in January put a number on it: about 700 positions in the retail, small-business and syndicated-loan businesses would be affected, out of roughly 2,700 employees, about a quarter of the bank. The affected staff can apply for open roles at National Bank through a dedicated channel, but the circular said there was no information yet on how many roles there would be. National Bank’s careers site listed about 300 open roles at the time, 62 of them in wealth management. Fairstone, which keeps the commercial business, promised its employees their base salary, bonuses, retirement savings and benefits for at least a year.

Fairstone Bank bought all of Laurentian’s common shares at $40.50 each, and National Bank took the retail and small-business portfolios. The announcement put the price at about $1.9 billion. The shares actually bought, 44,891,369 of them, cost about $1.8 billion. National Bank took about $3.7 billion of assets and about $8 billion of liabilities. The gap is the deposits: a customer’s deposit is money the bank owes, so $7.6 billion of retail deposits and $0.6 billion of small-business deposits sit on the liabilities side, against $3.3 billion of retail loans, $0.8 billion of small-business loans and $0.9 billion of syndicated loans, plus $3.4 billion of mutual funds. National Bank had already bought the syndicated loan book in February, paying $646.2 million for loans with $705.7 million outstanding. About 260,000 clients move with the portfolios. For National Bank, the whole book is small: roughly 1.7 percent of its loan book and 2.5 percent of its deposits.

The bank that closed on Friday began in 1846 as the Montreal City and District Savings Bank, founded by Bishop Ignace Bourget and 15 Montrealers to serve the city’s working-class Catholics. It took the Laurentian name in 1987 and built a branch network across Quebec. The network had been shrinking for a decade before the sale: in 2016 the bank had 148 branches and 3,651 employees, and it merged 50 branches and cut 300 positions, calling its traditional model obsolete. An attempt to find a buyer in 2023 failed. In 2024 the bank lost $5.5 million on revenue of $1.02 billion. By the time the deal was announced, the bank that once served working-class savers from a branch on every main street had 55 branches left, and a buyer who wanted the accounts but not the branches.

In a Quebec discussion forum the week before the closure, the subject of Laurentian came up as an aside in a thread about Desjardins. One commenter wrote, in French, “La Laurentienne vient effectivement d’être achetée par la Banque Nationale, les comptes sont transférés la fin de semaine prochaine” (Laurentian has indeed been bought by National Bank; the accounts transfer next weekend). “Y’en a une. La banque nationale. Y’avait aussi la Laurentienne mais elle disparait je crois” — that was another commenter’s whole account of it (there was also Laurentian, but it’s disappearing, I think). A third had left years earlier: “j’ai quitté la banque préhistorique qu’est Laurentienne. Sont tu encore en affaires?” (I left the prehistoric bank that is Laurentian; are they still in business?) And a fourth reduced the week to one line: “Laurentiene ferme cette semaine, les utilisateurs migrent vers banque nationale” (Laurentian closes this week, users are migrating to National Bank). The banks’ announcement promised “seamless continuity and superior service throughout the transition period,” and National Bank’s chief executive said he looked forward to welcoming the customers. The people writing about it did not argue with the deal. They stated the ending as a fact, or as something that had already happened to them years ago.

No hour is named for Monday’s restoration. The migration page never states plainly whether personal chequing and savings account numbers change — it tells customers to give payers the new number promptly, and says only investment accounts get new numbers outright. The migration itself runs to late 2026, so Monday restores access; it does not finish the move. The money, at least, is safe: both banks are members of the Canada Deposit Insurance Corporation, which insures eligible deposits up to $100,000 per category.

Laurentian’s common shares were delisted from the Toronto Stock Exchange. The Series 13 preferred shares remain listed.