President Barack Obama will meet the leaders of top U.S. banks Friday, a session that will focus on the White House's drive to overhaul financial regulations and on thorny issues like executive compensation.

The meeting, scheduled for noon in the State Dining Room, comes days before Obama leaves for the Group of 20 summit in London.

A White House official said 15 bank chief executives were expected to attend Friday's gathering. A person with knowledge of the meeting said participants would include top executives from Citibank, Wells Fargo & Co. (WFC), JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM), Morgan Stanley (MS), Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS), Bank of America Corp. (BAC), Northern Trust Corp. (NTRS), US Bancorp, Fannie Mae (FNM), Freddie Mac (FRE), PNC Financial Services Group Inc. (PNC), and State Street Corp. (STT).

"The president looks forward to getting an update from them on what precisely they're seeing in the economy on real estate commercial loans," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said Thursday. "And obviously they'll talk about stuff that's been in the news ... over the past several weeks, get into compensation and bonuses and excesses like that, and the notion that we have to change the culture of the way Wall Street works."

Earlier this week, the Treasury Department unveiled its plans to help banks remove toxic assets from their balance sheets as well as sweeping proposals to enhance regulations over the financial sector.

Gibbs said Obama, who has struck a populist tone on the controversy over American International Group Inc.'s bonuses, won't change his message behind closed doors.

"The president isn't going to say one thing out here and a different thing in there," he said. "We're not going to get out of this financial crisis and we're not going to stabilize our financial system without healthy banks."

-By Henry J. Pulizzi, Dow Jones Newswires; 202-862-9256; henry.pulizzi@dowjones.com