Regions Financial Shares Plunged: What You Need to Know

Although we don't believe in timing the market or panicking over market movements, we do like to keep an eye on big changes -- just in case they're material to our investing thesis.

What: Shares of Alabama bank Regions Financial (NYSE: RF  ) slipped as much as 10% in intraday trading as investors reacted to a shake-up in the bank's risk department.

So what: The cover page of a recent Regions' presentation reads, "It's time to expect more." Today, investors may be frantically asking, "More of what?" In a press release after the close yesterday, the company disclosed that Bill Wells, the company's chief risk officer, had resigned along with the director of credit risk and the head of problem asset management. When you're talking about a bank that's been hit pretty hard by the financial crisis and is still experiencing declining credit quality, a mass departure in the risk department is understandably unsettling.

Now what: Not surprisingly, the bank's press release isn't much help -- it contains the obligatory back-patting for the departing executives' "valuable contributions" and tries to soothe worries over the reason for the departures. But investors aren't buying it and I don't blame them -- if everything were hunky-dory at Regions and the bank was vanquishing its balance sheet issues, we probably wouldn't be seeing turnover like this in such a crucial department.

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