Bank of the West, the San Francisco-based subsidiary of BNP Paribas, has hired Kirsten Garen as chief information officer.

Garen joins the company from Visa, where she led a team that developed new products and services across the firm's commercial and consumer units as head of global distributed technology. Before that, she was senior vice president for brokerage and trading solutions at Charles Schwab for six years. 

At Bank of the West, she reports to Mike Bracco, the chief administrative officer. It is not clear if she replaces anyone in this role and the bank could not be reached at the time of publication.

The firm is engaged in an expansion of its wealth management division and earlier this month hired Brian Katz as a senior vice president to lead the newly-created banking and sales strategy team under its wealth management group. In November the firm opened its first of five planned specialist offices for high net worth clients in the Denver metro area in Centennial, Colorado. The other locations are slated to include San Francisco and Los Angeles, California.