Jenius Bank, a digital bank division of Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp., is closing, according to a WARN notice filed last week in multiple states.
The 173 employees affected by layoffs associated with the closure will be terminated at the end of a 60-day notice period, or around March 10, according to the filing.
An SMBC spokesperson confirmed the closure Monday.
“SMBC has announced the wind-down of Jenius Bank, the digital banking unit in SMBC MANUBANK,” the spokesperson said. “This includes suspending new account openings and new loan originations.”
Jenius has neither made an official announcement nor updated its website.
But several Jenius employees posted on LinkedIn since Thursday that they were now “open to work” because the bank was closing.
Two former employees confirmed the layoffs and that Takeshi Okamoto, chair and CEO of Jenius’ legal entity SMBC Manubank, informed them in a virtual all-hands meeting Thursday that Jenius would be shutting down.
During the roughly 10-minute meeting, Okamoto and at least one other company representative informed employees about an email they would receive at their personal account if they were being let go, or their work email if they were staying on as part of a transition team.
One employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said she was in a meeting with her team afterward discussing potential next steps when she was kicked off and locked out of her Microsoft Teams and Outlook programs.
A second employee, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity, said he lost access to his work programs two minutes after the all-hands meeting ended.
Okamoto told employees that Jenius was closing down in part due to “market performance,” one employee said, adding that the digital bank wasn’t yet profitable and wouldn’t be as profitable as quickly as its parent company wanted.
When asked if she had had concerns about company operations, an employee said while there were “lots of people who were working very hard and doing great at their jobs, [the] larger tone at Jenius was ‘over promise, under deliver.’ They just never got it right, to be quite honest,” she said.
“We all thought that the all-hands would be a trimming-the-fat kind of call,” she said, “because we assumed [the bank] had not been hitting targets.”
One of the employees who spoke with Banking Dive was hired less than six months ago, and said he felt like he was “sold a lie” to join Jenius.
“Saying it planned to double its current workforce in the next couple of years, and [having] all these big new products it was working on, I was convinced to leave a stable job to come here, with backing from one of the biggest banks in the world … to four months later, pushing me out the door along with tons of other people who recently got hired,” he said.
“It's crazy to me that you can go from mass hiring to, ‘yeah, never mind, we're not doing this anymore,’” he said. “It's not like they're like a small startup.”
SMBC launched Jenius in 2023, tapping John Rosenfeld, the founder and former president of Citizens Bank’s digital bank, to lead the bank. Jenius surpassed $1 billion in deposits and $900 million in personal loans in its first year of business, and it had plans to offer checking accounts.
Rosenfeld spoke highly of Jenius’ parent company in a 2024 interview with Banking Dive, saying at the time that SMBC gave Jenius “all the support we could have ever wanted.”
Rosenfeld declined to comment Monday.
An outside customer service representative for Jenius said via telephone Friday morning that the bank was not closing down, and that she didn’t know why employees would be indicating otherwise.
Additionally, Jenius’ X account was deleted Friday, and its LinkedIn page was wiped of all posts.
