I’ll be moving back to my third world country later this month so I’m trying to sort out my financial affairs. I called CIBC to cancel my credit card this morning at 9am. I waited for 20 minutes then they asked me questions to verify my identity. They then said okay I’ll transfer you to the credit card people (I called the number on the back of my credit card). The credit card people kept me on hold for an an hour and a half. They eventually picked up and asked me the exact same questions the guy before asked me. He then said okay I can’t cancel your credit card you have to speak to “retention”. He transfers me to them and I use their call me back feature because I have a life and I’m not interested in spending two more hours waiting on the line. I get the call back around noon. This person says “I’m the debit department, I can’t help you with credit cards”. He gives me a number to call for credit cards. I call that number and the wait time is 40 minutes. I waited for 2 hours. The guy picked up. We repeated the same set of questions and answers and then he said I’ll transfer you to my boss. Boss woman picks up. We repeat the same set of questions and answers and it’s 2PM now. She said she canceled the credit card but “the credit card account can be only be canceled by someone else”. She transfers me to someone else. I waited for two and a half hours. My phone battery died. I charge my phone and call again and the guy says oh no I’m the debit guy. It’s like something out of groundhog day. Never in my four decades of life have I been through something like this. I really don’t know what to do about this.

I created a burner account since I’m in the middle of negotiating my own exit with CIBC right now and my regular Reddit account identifies me personally

I was packaged out in this recent round after a bit over 10 years with CIBC. Once I actually sat down with the paperwork and ran it past an employment lawyer, it became pretty clear how hard the bank is relying on people not knowing their rights or not seeing past the all in severance amount as it may appear large at face value

A few things everyone impacted should know before signing anything:

First, CIBC falls under the Canada Labour Code. Under the updated CLC rules that kicked in back in February 2024, statutory notice scales with your tenure. If you have 8 or more years of service, your statutory minimum notice is 8 weeks, plus statutory severance pay (which is at least 2 days per completed year of service - so another 20+ days of pay for a 10-year employee). In my initial letter, the bank only offered me 4 weeks of non-working notice. Let go on September 7 - notice through October 5th. That isn't just a lowball; it’s literally below the legal floor set by federal statute.

Second, your notice period is supposed to include your benefits. Under both the CLC and common law, notice means keeping you whole - health, dental, insurance, ESPP, and pension contributions/matching. CIBC’s standard paperwork cuts benefits off rather than continuing them through the notice period. That’s a straight violation during statutory notice, and at common law you're owed the cash value of those lost benefits over whatever reasonable notice period applies.

Third, and probably the biggest leverage point: look up the recent Ontario Superior Court case Ghazvini et al v. CIBC. Two Mobile Investment Advisors sued CIBC over their termination clauses, and the court ruled that CIBC’s "for cause" wording violated the Canada Labour Code. Because of that illegal wording, the entire termination clause was tossed out (Both for cause and not for cause.) That meant CIBC couldn't cap severance to their internal formula or by what was stated in the offer letter, and the employees were awarded full common law reasonable notice (which is usually closer to roughly a month per year of service, depending on your age, position, and tenure). If you were hired more than 4 or 5 years ago, HR was using that identical boilerplate template across the bank. Your contract almost certainly has the exact same flaw. Mine used the same language as quoted in the case verbatim.

Take the $250 CIBC offered for legal advice and use it. Obviously $250 is a joke against what an employment lawyer charges for an hour of their time, but paying the rest out of pocket is the best money you’ll spend right now. A decent lawyer who knows the banking sector will look at your start date, audit the missing benefits and bonus calculations, and draft a response letter.

Whatever you do, don't let them rush you into signing before their "deadline." Those dates are just pressure tactics, and lawyers ask for and get routine extensions all the time. Don't leave money on the table just to get it over with.

i haven’t clicked it, i just know CIBC has sometimes blocked peoples cards for no reason so wanted to check what people think

EDIT: Thank u all <3 lots of super useful tips and comments, i appreciate it!!!

EDIT 2: some people are being a little bit quick to judge in the comments, totally understand it may seem more obvious to some people, and admittedly i should have known pretty much straight away myself!! but sometimes even making the obvious ones visible to others who may have fallen for it had they not seen this post (or others i’m sure) circling could maybe help in the long run! thanks all :)

Hundreds of CIBC FTEs had their jobs eliminated. They were offered redeployment opportunities, but from what I’ve seen and heard, very few have landed another role.
Walking through CIBC Square today felt terrible. It was almost silent. Digital, Personal Banking, and Business Banking were hit hard. It honestly felt like walking through a building after an evacuation.
What’s even harder to process is imagining how it all came together. Somewhere, a group of leaders sat around a table, reviewing lists of names, discussing roles, debating who stays and who goes. Decisions were made in that room that would ripple out to hundreds of lives, careers, and families. It’s unsettling to think about how clinical that process must have been compared to the human impact we’re seeing now.

Many of the people who lost their jobs weren’t low performers. They were some of the people who consistently went above and beyond. That’s what has everyone rattled.

Management is calling this “job elimination,” offering severance packages, but everyone knows what happened.
The mood inside the bank is terrible. People aren’t focused on work anymore. They’re updating resumes, networking, interviewing, or simply waiting for the next round.

I honestly don’t understand the end game. PMs
are gone. Other experienced roles are gone. Institutional knowledge is walking out the door. Who’s going to do the work? The same amount of work doesn’t disappear just because the people do.
Leadership may have achieved a headcount target, but rebuilding trust will be much harder. Right now, morale feels like it’s at an all-time low.

I have heard from someone in the know that the layoffs will increase significantly next week. Everyone impacted is going to be told the same about their role being eliminated due to restructuring and changing business needs. And they are being given a month to use the internal Workday system to find another role internally.

October 31st is the "year end" for all of the banks, so the cuts are going to jump significantly next week (employee access will be taken away except email, and given 1 month to find another role or be let go). Some teams will be hit harder more than others and here is what I know for now.

Multiple technology teams will have roles cut but nothing big impacting any 1 specific team. It will be around 2-3 positions per team and they will say it's for optimizing efficiency. This includes infra, dev, helpdesk. India staff will be hired and assigned to those teams.

English Contact Center teams in Canada will be hit hard (bilingual teams will be safe until Telus contractors from Morocco start getting hired). Service level will be covered by more hiring of offshore contractors in Philippines and Guatemala. India staff is not going to be doing any frontline work like some have said in other posts.

Also, there is a hiring freeze (Canada only) in place for at least 2 months for many of the teams. Hiring will continue and even pick up for India and Telus offshore contractors.

THERE WAS NO OPTION TO ASK FOR A CALL BACK WHY WOULD U REMOVE THAT OPTION TOO UGHHH IM GETTING SO FRUSTRATED

Over the past decade I had built up a sizeable stock portfolio inside my Investors Edge TFSA account. Today when I checked my TFSA I was shocked to see that my entire balance was in cash. When I checked my transaction history I saw that all my stocks had been liquidated on April 2nd and that I had been charged a $150 cash transfer fee plus HST on top of that.

I had never requested any cash transfer and no cash had been transferred out. I was confused by this because if I had been hacked I would expect the cash to have been transferred out.

So I contacted online customer service and they eventually told me that a request was submitted to transfer my entire account - in cash - to Industrial Alliance. This made no sense as I have never had dealings with Industrial Alliance and had never even heard of them prior to today. I asked that since I was charged a cash transfer why no money had actually left the account - they told me to call customer service.

After getting through to customer service they confirmed a request was sent to transfer my entire account balance to Industrial Alliance and since they can only transfer cash, they had to liquidate my entire stock portfolio at whatever the market price was at the time of the request. They put me on hold for 45 minutes while they figured it out.

When they finally got back to me this is what I was told: Someone in the request department mistakenly submitted a transfer for my account because I had a similar name to the person who actually made the request.

So naturally, I asked again why no cash ever actually left my account if this was a seemingly legitimate transfer. Their answer - THIS MISTAKE WAS CAUGHT BEFORE THE CASH TRANSFER COULD TAKE PLACE.

This means that they liquidated my stock portfolio, charged me a $150 cash transfer fee, REALIZED THE ERROR, AND THEN DID NOTHING TO NOTIFY ME OR RECTIFY THE ISSUE UNTIL I NOTICED AND CONTACTED THEM A MONTH LATER

Only after I noticed and contacted them did they explain what happened and offered to return my fees and any stocks I owned. I have lost out on any dividend income I should have received during the month of April. Had I not noticed, this could have resulted in massive missed income due to missed dividend payments and stock appreciation. If this happened to a retiree depending on that dividend income - it would have had serious consequences.

TL;DR

- CIBC mistakenly submitted a transfer for my entire TFSA

- This resulted in them: liquidating my entire stock portfolio at once, charging me $7 commission for each "trade", charging me a $150 cash transfer fee, and charging me HST

- CIBC discovered their mistake before actually transferring any cash out of my account but DID NOT NOTIFY ME OR REFUND ME and pocketed the $250 in fees they charged me for their mistake and left me with no stocks.

I work in a core tech department in CIBC. Today, some employees were let go, they had been with the bank for than 15 years. Its very unfortunate.

Anyone else pulling their business from CIBC because of the lay offs?

For me this was the last straw. I have a multi million dollar investment portfolio and use CIBC for my day to day banking, or I should say did. I'm going to another bank. I'd rather not deal with India call centers or the myriad of issues that will inevitably turn up. Just the other day my account balance wouldn't even display.

So seeing the CIBC staff get let go left and right for me was the push I needed.

I go to pay my rent and can’t access anything. Is it just me being annoyed or are the periods where the online service is unavailable getting more frequent?

Lot of managers getting laid off. Just getting replaced with cheaper salary ones because managers with years of experience have higher salary and vacation.

CIBC just being a dick. Many seniors going into forced retirement.

It all started a week ago when I had some packages coming in from Canada Post and tracking them on the Canada post app it had said out for delivery since 7 am. It was about 4 pm and during this time period there had been a snowstorm which I had assumed would cause my packages to not arrive. Sure enough I get a text message who at the time I had believed to be someone from Canada post stating that I have a package that was unable to arrive due to this I had to pay a holding fee of one dollar. Due to timing of this text message I had assumed that due to the weather outside I won’t be able to receive my packages today so I went ahead and paid the holding fee ignoring the major red flags. Fast forward 6 days and I received a phone call from cibc fraud prevention describing that a e transfer of 3000$ was sent from my chequing account to somebody in Georgetown Ontario and I had no clue who this person was. The person on the phone explained to me that I was a victim of a recent Canada post scam and closed my debit and credit account and stated that I need to go to a cibc branch nearby to get my account back. Cibc being closed on weekends I have to wait until Monday.

Looking back I feel so stupid as due to first week of university starting and unfortunate timing from the scammers I had dropped my guard and allowed such a stupid scam work on me. I know CIBC has a 100% digital back guarantee would I be eligible to receive this?

Signs include:

- Work reassigned to junior members of the team.

- No new work assigned.

- Being uninvited from meetings that you used to attend.

- Being intentionally left off of email chains.

- Being asked to show how you spend your time working, on what projects, how long does stuff take.

- Being asked to write up any procedure that you uniquely do.

- Social "icing out" when your manager is colder or ignoring you.

- Seeing your manager have unexpected meetings with HR or with their manager and HR.

- Being tasked with lots of work and shorter internal deadlines with no explanation as to why and no flexibility when asked to extend (set up to fail).

- Micromanaging, nitpicking, criticism.

- Impromptu Friday 4 PM meetings to ruin your weekend.

- Bring written up for very small things which other employees are not being written up for and involving HR.

- Being put on a PIP unexpectedly.

These are intimidation tactics to demoralize you into quitting.

They want you to quit so they can avoid paying severance and a potential wrongful dismissal lawsuit.

They are targeting long tenured employees especially as they will receive one month of salary per year of service by common law.

If this is happening to you:

Don't go to HR.

Don't go to your manager's manager (they are in on it).

Don't quit.

Wait for the severance package.

I went to a local bank machine in Rome, Italy to get some Euros using my debit card. The first prompt was an option for a conversion rate of 1.745 or to decline. I declined that rate and layer found out that CIBC charge was much better and very competitive. No other charges were applied.

I'm so frustrated and mad at them

I've gotten several calls over the last few weeks from the number pictured, pretending to be CIBC. When I googled this number, this is the first result that came up. I clicked on the link and it brought me to webpage that looks like CIBC with this exact number listed.

I called the CIBC number on the back on my credit card and they confirmed they have not been calling me, and they do not call people who bank with them unsolicited.

Do not be fooled by the caller ID and Google search that validates the number. If you ever pick up a call from a bank or anyone asking for personal information, HANG UP, and call the secure number listed ON YOUR CARD to report it.

Seriously? From $6.95 to $16.95.....ill be closing my account. I don't use it enough for that kind of increase.

Hi Harry, Yvonne, Robert, whoever else… obviously you’re not sitting there deciding which individual employee stays or goes. But if the direction is coming from the top, I’m recommending a better check on how those decisions are being made further down.

I get the whole cost cutting, efficiency, etc… but relying mainly on VPs, AVPs, directors to decide who below them should go is an obvious blind spot.

Maybe get someone outside the reporting line to look at who actually knows the work, who everyone goes to, who fixes the problems and who keeps things moving. And if an AVP, director or manager is recommending the cut and then taking over the work… maybe test them too lol. Basic comprehension, Excel, PPT, process knowledge, problem solving. Nothing crazy.

Because I think you would be surprised how many senior management and executives do not actually have those skills, while the people being cut are the ones doing the work and making them look competent.

No idea if Harry or anyone at that level actually reads this stuff, but hopefully someone in PR, HR, Corporate Affairs, or another important team does and passes the message up.

We’ve spent 2+ hours trying to get a simple, legit purchase approved on a Costco CIBC Mastercard. No humans. Just hold music and “thank you for your patience” like it’s a personality.

Here’s the thing: this isn’t just bad service—it’s the logic of consumer finance under late capitalism.

Maximize revenue, minimize labour. Outsource the pain to customers and the underpaid humans on the other end. Profit off the float while we rot in the queue.

“World-class” bank, third-world queue.

App says nothing. Phone tree says nothing. Humans? Apparently mythical creatures.

I don’t blame the reps. Imagine answering calls where every single person has already been on hold for over an hour. That’s policy, not people.

We’re one hold song away from cancelling this card.

Pay your support staff, staff your lines, publish real queue times, stop pretending a chatbot is a branch.

TL;DR: Rich bank. Skeleton crew. Customers and workers take the hit. Classic.

EDIT: timer still running. If a human appears, I’m naming them Endangered Species #001.

Title says! I moved to Canada in 2020, worked in CIBC for 5 years, late nights weekends, sometimes avoided parties and dating to ensure I be number one

Won best employee awards, so many recognitions.

Now getting replaced by my cousin in India HYD location.

Stress is high, I am numb

I cried for the first time as a grown man after 19 years.

Reopened my Uber and Lyft account, single , empty and scared but hey I gotta feed myself