BOSTON – Sovereign Bank has a new leader.
Banco Santander SA, the Spanish bank that owns Sovereign, announced Tuesday that it has appointed Jorge Morán, a senior Santander executive, as the new CEO of Sovereign. Morán will also be top officer for Santander’s other U.S. businesses.
He replaces Gabriel Jaramillo, who had served as Sovereign’s chief executive since February 2009, when Santander acquired the Pennsylvania-based bank. Sovereign said Jaramillo is joining the U.N. Office of Special Envoy for Malaria, but he will remain as nonexecutive chairman of the board of Sovereign and Santander Holdings USA Inc.
The changes “reflect the successful completion of the first phase of integration of Sovereign into Grupo Santander [Banco Santander’s parent] and the goal of further strengthening Santander’s U.S. businesses,” Santander said.
The appointment comes a month after Providence Business News learned that Steven Issa, the longtime Sovereign market president in Rhode Island, stepped down. The reasons for his departure are still unclear.
Morán is a senior executive vice president of Banco Santander, head of its global insurance division and a member of the group’s management committee. He joined the Santander Group in 2002 as head of asset management. In 2005 and 2006, he was chief operating officer of Abbey, Santander’s business in the United Kingdom, and from 2005 until 2008, a member of its board of directors.
Before joining Santander, Morán was CEO of Morgan Stanley in Spain and Portugal, and a partner of AB Asesores, a brokerage and asset management company.
Morán will be the fourth CEO since 2008 for Sovereign, which had been hit hard by mortgage and other consumer–credit losses in recent years. One of the CEOs was Paul A. Perrault, a Central Falls native who was on the job for less than a month before Santander acquired Sovereign and replaced him with Jaramillo.
Despite his short stint, Perrault was eligible for a $7.2 million severance package under the terms of his contract.
Although officially based in Pennsylvania, the bank has moved most of its top executive offices to Boston. The bank is the No. 6 bank in Rhode Island by deposits, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.
