Canadian Banks Make Push to Beef Up Utilities Expertise in the US

The Globe and Mail, Christina Pellegrini and Niall McGee, 24 September 2017

When word got out in July that Hydro One Ltd. had retained Moelis & Co. to advise on its $4.4-billion deal for Spokane, Wash.-based utility Avista Corp., the reaction from many on Bay Street was: Hydro One hired who?

The transaction showed just how fierce the competition is for this kind of work and how Canadian investment banks have to do more to stay relevant to companies that are plotting growth outside of Canada. Moelis, a New York-based boutique bank, was well suited for the role "given their depth of M&A experience in the U.S. regulated electricity sector," a Hydro One spokesperson said last week. Canadian banks weren't entirely shut out: Three led Hydro One's equity financing deal to help pay for Avista, leveraging their vast institutional and retail distribution networks to raise money quickly. But Moelis ultimately won the lucrative advisory mandate – earning bragging rights as the top dog – and pocketed a $16-million fee, according to an estimate by Thomson Reuters.

In recent years, deal flow in infrastructure has exploded around the globe. Flush with cash, investment funds are on the hunt for assets with stable cash flow and governments are cashing in by moving to privatize certain public assets at rich valuations. This dynamic has resulted in a boom in dealmaking. Meantime, Canadian power and utilities companies have been keen on doing deals in the United States to diversify their businesses, access growing markets and boost their return on equity, says Mona Nazir, an analyst at Laurentian Bank Securities.

As companies expand into new regions, Canada's biggest investment banks are following suit. Many are bolstering their power and utility teams in the United States, hiring more bankers to work on the ground and boosting their coverage of the sector south of the border to capture more deal activity.

"Our Canadian clients' needs are evolving and are increasingly focused on the U.S.," said Pierre-Olivier Perras, the co-head of the power and energy infrastructure group at BMO Nesbitt Burns Inc. The bank is responding by looking at expanding its U.S. utilities practice, he added. "It's really about having the right relationships and the best ideas at the right time."

TD Securities too has singled out the sector as one of its key focuses over the next few years.

Scotia Capital Inc. began expanding its power and utilities franchise outside Canada years ago, following clients such as Emera Inc. and Fortis Inc. into the U.S. market. And it is still looking to add bankers to its U.S. team. In the next 12 months, the bank expects to have the same number of power and utility bankers on both sides of the border, said Charles Emond, who is co-head of global investment banking.

The bank has also built a presence in Latin America in a bid to advise local power and utilities clients or financial players such as the Canadian pension funds. While still early days in these countries, Mr. Emond estimates that roughly half of Scotia Capital's deal flow in the pipeline in the Pacific Alliance region is in power and utilities.

What matters most to acquirers is the proprietary insight their bank has about the regulatory landscape and a potential target, as well as access to that company's management and main shareholders.

"Those relationships with the target is really what resonates the most with the acquirer," Mr. Emond said. "That relationship, the access, the knowledge about the market is the way to often differentiate yourself and get hired."

But despite efforts by Canadian investment banks, they at times fall short when they compete against large U.S. firms for advisory mandates on cross-border deals.

San Francisco-based Wells Fargo Securities has advised on a number of large-cap utility, power and pipeline deals during the past few years, advising both U.S. and Canadian acquirers. When Wells is able to beat out the Canadian competition, said Eric Fornell, vice-chair of investment banking and capital markets, it's often because of lending relationships with companies that go back decades and deep ties with management.

Last year, when Wells advised TransCanada Corp. on its acquisition of Columbia Pipeline Group Inc., Mr. Fornell's relationships with decision makers on both sides was a major factor in winning the mandate; he'd known the CFO of Columbia for 20 years and the head of M&A at TransCanada since 1999. With that kind of history, bankers can have a very "straightforward, direct conversation" with management teams in a way "that's not threatening to them," he said.

Furthermore, when Algonquin Power & Utilities Corp. was negotiating to buy the Empire District Electric Co. in 2016, not only did Mr. Fornell know Algonquin's management well, he knew the Moelis adviser on the other side, having previously worked with him at another bank.

"He was not going to steer me wrong, and I'm not going to tell him anything that's untrue," he said of his dealings with his ex-colleague.

In terms of other Canadian banks in the United States, Mr. Fornell gives kudos to RBC Dominion Securities Inc., saying they have a solid team of bankers on the ground. "We're seeing RBC a lot," he said. (RBC declined to comment for this story.)

"They're doing business and they're lending money," he added. "It's just that in some cases, Wells Fargo and other U.S. banks have been at it longer."

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TD Securities Readies for Prime Time in the US

The Globe and Mail, Niall McGee, 20 September 2017

At the main offices of TD Securities Inc. in New York, some 250 people buzz around on its trading floor – a patch of real estate once occupied by German colossus Deutsche Bank AG.

The Canadian bank-owned dealer is bulking up – even as some of its foreign competitors pull back. Over the past three years, TD Securities has increased its hiring in the United States, adding 300 people to bring its head count to roughly 900. Over the same period, it has boosted revenue in its U.S. business at an annual clip of 18 per cent and is targeting more double-digit growth in the years ahead.

But making further gains in a region that is drastically more cutthroat than the Canadian market won't be easy. While TD is already a formidable force in the retail banking market in the United States, it's still not clear whether that strong brand presence can make it a dominant player in capital markets.

"While [the United States] is exceptionally lucrative, it is also very competitive, and you don't have the same history and you don't have the same Rolodex and access to the C Suite as you do in Canada and it becomes a much tougher slog," John Aiken, an analyst with Barclays Capital, said in an interview.

In the United States, TD Securities is a tiny fish in an enormous pond, with only about 2-per-cent market share in capital markets – a minnow compared with U.S. behemoths such as JPMorgan Chase & Co. and still smaller than rival Canadian dealer RBC Dominion Securities Inc., which has the strongest footprint of any Canadian bank in U.S. capital markets.

The United States is orders of magnitude bigger than the home market and represents a novel source of growth for TD in capital markets. Added revenue from investment banking, trading and corporate banking also acts as a buffer against any stumbles in the retail part of the business, which over the past decade has made up the bulk of the Toronto-based bank's profit and revenue.

"Our objective is to grow the wholesale earnings of the bank more significantly," Glenn Gibson, vice-chair and regional head for TD Securities USA, said in an interview this summer. "The best opportunity to do that is in the U.S. market."

TD's wholesale business – corporate lending and capital markets – has historically lingered around 9 per cent to 10 per cent of earnings, much lower than those of bank-owned Canadian competitors such as BMO Nesbitt Burns Inc. and RBC, which are closer to 25 per cent.

However, since becoming chief executive officer in late 2014, Bharat Masrani has signalled a shift in TD's strategy that puts more emphasis on expanding its capital-markets business, particularly in the United States.

It's a strategy that deviates from that of his predecessor, Ed Clark, who chiefly focused on growing the bank's retail business during his almost-12-year run.

"Where TD strategically may be more open to a venture like this stems from the fact that Bharat had spent the bulk of his time before he became CEO in the U.S.," Mr. Aiken said. "It's a very different marketplace, which has benefits as well as idiosyncrasies, which Bharat may feel a lot more comfortable with than Ed."

While TD has serious ground to make up in U.S. capital markets, it's not starting from zero. In a handful of areas it is already competitive, particularly in foreign-exchange trading and certain segments of fixed income and corporate lending. For example, in the telecom sector, TD was the 12th-biggest lender in the United States last year, according to Thomson Reuters, and the ninth-biggest dealer in supranational, subsovereign and agency (SSA) debt.

But TD sees opportunities to make greater inroads.

The dealer wants to grab a piece of prime brokerage space for the hedge-fund industry – a lucrative niche that includes providing margin financing and lending securities for shorting. It also aims to become a contender in mortgage-backed securities trading, a previously maligned but still important and profitable subset of the fixed-income market.

TD is under no illusion about how tough it will be to make it big in the United States. "We don't expect anything to be given to us," Mr. Gibson said. "We earn every piece of business that we attract in the U.S."

TD Securities has a long history in the United States. It became a fully fledged investment bank and broker-dealer in 1989. Through the 1990s it was a niche operation, focused mainly on lending to media and telecom companies and the energy sector, and operated separately from its fledgling Canadian unit.

By the mid-2000s, things started to change. Starting in 2004, TD made a number of major retail acquisitions in the United States, spending billions to buy the likes of Banknorth Group Inc. and Commerce Bancorp Inc. But despite a vast improvement in brand awareness, TD didn't make great strides in capital markets. One reason was the cautious nature of Mr. Clark, who viewed the segment as risky and volatile.

"Clark wasn't interested in competing against Goldman Sachs or other investment banks in the United States. That was pointless," Howard Green wrote in his bestselling 2013 book, Banking on America: How TD rose to the top and took on the U.S.A.

Before the financial crisis, TD had no obvious competitive advantage. With every major global dealer vying for business, TD was "struggling to add value outside Canada," Moti Jungreis, head of global markets with TD Securities, said in an interview.

But after the financial crisis, with no exposure to toxic U.S. subprime debt, TD suddenly had an edge. The Canadian dealer was seen as a reliable counterparty to trade with, and its hefty balance sheet allowed it to lend big to corporate clients when others were pulling back.

Chastened and weakened in the years since, European banks such as Deutsche Bank and Royal Bank of Scotland have become drastically weaker players in the United States, presenting a further opportunity for Canadian banks such as TD to fill the void.

Over the past six years, TD's expansion in the United States has intensified. That has meant beefing up its U.S. fixed-income, derivatives and foreign-exchange operations and broadening its corporate-lending business by getting into areas such as autos, utilities and real estate. In 2014, it became a primary dealer, which means it can trade U.S. treasuries.

While TD has mostly built out its capital markets imprint in the United States by creating its own platform, in September, 2016, it announced the acquisition of Albert Fried & Co. The boutique dealer had been in the midst of building a prime brokerage unit that services hedge funds – one of the most active of all traders in capital markets. TD has spent much of this year completing the buildout of the unit, which it has rebranded as TD Prime Services.

TD has also spent a good chunk of 2017 building a mortgage-backed securities platform, which it is close to launching. While banks' exposure to mortgage-backed securities was a major factor in causing the financial crisis of 2008-09, the sector has rebounded strongly in the past few years, in lockstep with the housing market. According to Thomson Reuters, mortgage-backed securities currently represent about 15 per cent of the fixed-income trading market in the United States.

But despite the expansion in its capital markets footprint, there are still weaknesses in TD's coverage in areas such as structured products and municipal debt.

"We need to widen our product [offerings] in the U.S. so we can be more relevant to more clients," Mr. Jungreis said.

The dealer does little business in cash equities. It has a limited institutional equities distribution and only a small cluster of people trading interlisted shares. With margins razor-thin for all banks in cash equities, TD isn't planning to make major inroads into the sector either.

But perhaps the most glaring omission in TD's playbook is in M&A advice, one of the most profitable of all areas in capital markets. Juicy mandates such as advising Shaw Communications Inc. on its $2.3-billion sale of its U.S. data centre business, Via West, earlier this year, are few and far between. While TD has made inroads in the energy and technology, media and telecom sectors, the dealer is hopeful it can win larger mandates in other burgeoning areas, such as the utilities sector.

Over the past few years, it's not just TD's product offerings that have evolved in the United States, it's the investment bank's entire ethos around the region. Long gone is the island mentality of old. The dealer now speaks in terms of its "U.S. dollar business." What that means is the firm's bankers in New York liaise seamlessly with Canadian clients who want access to U.S. capital markets, and vice versa.

But while all divisions are profitable in the United States, Mr. Gibson said, margins aren't what they are in Canada.

"To get to the same margins in the U.S that you have in Canada, you have to get a size and scale that makes sense. We're getting there."

Over the next three years, TD is targeting 15-per-cent annual revenue growth a year in the United States. One way to hit that mark is getting stronger in the "real money" space, as Mr. Gibson terms it. That means building relationships with, and winning more business with the likes of Blackrock Inc. and State Street Corp., which oversee trillions of dollars for investors, vastly more more than the biggest asset managers in Canada.

Although TD isn't aiming to supplant the likes of a JPMorgan or Goldman Sachs in the United States, Mr. Gibson says it can go head to head with the big guns in certain areas.

"We're not trying to be an aggregate league table player. We're not going to knock off the top five U.S. banks," he said. "But can we be right below that lead group of U.S. broker-dealer universal banks? Absolutely we can. And that's where we should be."

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RBC & City National: How Canada’s Biggest Bank Overhauled Its US Strategy

The Globe and Mail, James Bradshaw, 8 September 2017

There's no sign of Michael J. Fox, Helen Mirren, Martin Scorsese or any of the other Hollywood stars who have been clients of City National Bank in CEO Russell Goldsmith's office. The closest hint of celebrity in Mr. Goldsmith's eighth-floor, Beverly Hills suite is an autographed picture that shows him shaking hands with Ben Bernanke, formerly the world's most powerful central banker as chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve.

There are prints by artists David Hockney and Richard Diebenkorn, whose genius captured California's essence, interspersed with more personal mementos such as a photo with his father Bram, who preceded him as chairman and chief executive officer of the financial institution that's known in the United States as a premiere private banker to Hollywood.

And just behind his desk there is a plain white, faintly rumpled golf cap emblazoned with a blue RBC logo.

The cap is an important nod to City National's future – and to its parent, Royal Bank of Canada, which bought the Los Angeles-based bank for $7.1-billion in 2015. But it's also the only visible token of RBC's ownership in Mr Goldsmith's digs, which is emblematic of the Canadian bank's new, lower-profile approach to winning in the fiercely contested United States banking market.

The deal to acquire City National signalled a complete reboot of the Canadian bank's U.S. strategy and is the signature gambit RBC CEO Dave McKay has undertaken in his three years at the helm. It was RBC's largest acquisition in recent memory and the third-largest purchase by a Canadian bank since 2000.

The acquisition has left him with something to prove. Smaller rivals such as Toronto-Dominion Bank and Bank of Montreal built extensive banking networks south of the border – the former has more than 1,200 branches across the U.S. eastern seaboard, while the latter has been growing BMO Harris Bank in the Midwest since the mid-1980s. But for at least two decades – perhaps even longer – Royal Bank's top executives have wrestled with the question of how and where to find international growth.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, John Cleghorn took a stab at a number of deals, most of which didn't work out and the most significant of which was for a North Carolina bank called Centura Banks Inc. His successor, Gord Nixon, struggled valiantly to turn it into a meaningful foothold in the southeastern states, only to retreat after absorbing losses for 10 straight quarters in the aftermath of the global financial crisis.

Canadian banks have never won success easily in the crowded, cutthroat U.S. banking market. But with the acquisition of City National, Mr. McKay is trying again, driven by the need for new growth to supplement returns from a relatively saturated Canadian banking market. This time, he's charting a different course. The bank's executives have learned lessons from past missteps, he says, and have developed a more effective strategy to thrive in the United States.

Rather than trying to win the hyper-competitive retail market, RBC is staking a claim to a new niche south of the border: high-net-worth wealth management. Instead of slapping the bank's Canadian name on its new acquisition and "RBC-izing" its operations – costly mistakes it made the last time round – it's aiming to let City National be its own brand and largely preserve its own identity and culture as a high-touch relationship-based private bank to the stars. It even installed an executive on the California bank's board whose job has been, in part, to help ensure City National's independence by controlling the flow of demands coming from RBC in Toronto.

Whether RBC's light-touch approach will succeed is a vital question for the bank's long-term plans and could go a long way toward shaping Mr. McKay's legacy.

A new approach

Mr. McKay's courtship of City National began in the summer of 2013, at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills. When he first reached out to Mr. Goldsmith via a mutual acquaintance, RBC was a mystery to the U.S. CEO. The two executives spoke for the first time over dinner at the hotel. It was clear, though, that they are cut from different cloth. Mr. Goldsmith is the consummate relationship banker, with a warm smile and gregarious nature well-suited to Hollywood deal-making. Mr. McKay comes off as more conservative, a restless intellectual shaped in the more staid mould of Canada's banking culture. Even so, "we really connected," Mr. McKay said.

There was just one problem: City National wasn't for sale. "We saw a bright path ahead for City National as an independent company," Mr. Goldsmith said.

Mr. McKay, on the other hand, saw a promising future, and the lessons learned from the last time the bank tried to plant its flag on U.S. soil were never far from mind.

He was determined to avoid the mistakes that unfolded after RBC bought Centura Banks Inc. in 2001 for $3.3-billion as the centrepiece of an experiment in personal and commercial banking. Applying a piecemeal approach to the U.S. market, the Canadian bank soon took on another acquisition, Alabama National Bancorp., for nearly $1.8-billion, and assembled a loosely knit collection of more than 400 branches across six southeastern states including Georgia, Virginia and Florida.

But the network of outlets never achieved critical mass. Scattered across a string of disparate, smaller markets and heavily dependent on mortgage and construction lending, it struggled when the U.S. financial crisis struck. RBC had tried to establish a clear brand identity, splashing its name across its U.S. properties and eventually dropping the Centura brand altogether, naming its retail network RBC Bank. It even shelled out to name the arena that is home to the NHL's Carolina Hurricanes the RBC Center in an effort to build its brand in the United States. (The rink has since been renamed PNC Arena).

Yet as the financial crisis deepened, the bank was forced to swallow billions of dollars in losses and writedowns. By 2011, RBC had opted out of the U.S. retail banking market, selling its southeastern operations to Pittsburgh-based PNC Financial Services Group for $3.62-billion.

As it regrouped, RBC began looking at economic trends, assessing different parts of banking's profit pool, and looking at where the bank still had U.S. assets that could be built out – and by the time Mr. McKay reached out to Mr. Goldsmith, the executive team was developing a new vision. "We started by narrowing down to a space," said RBC's head of strategy and corporate development, Mike Dobbins.

The bank didn't want another retail network, particularly at a time when digital disruption and the rise of new fintech players is complicating the consumer market, Mr. McKay said in an interview at his Toronto office. Instead, RBC set its sights on three or four lenders occupying a different niche – high-touch, relationship-based private banking catering to high-net-worth and commercial clients. "But none had the breadth of City National," he said.

So at the restaurant table in Beverly Hills, Mr. McKay told Mr. Goldsmith: "I want to be your first call if you change your mind. That's all I want to hear." Then he flew home, determined to be patient but persistent.

Not long after, Mr. Goldsmith came calling. By 2014, the two banks were talking, and Mr. Goldsmith began to see the logic of his Canadian counterpart's vision. RBC wanted to unlock the potential of its undersized U.S. wealth-management business, headquartered in Minneapolis, and to drive its highly competitive New York-based capital markets arm to new heights. And City National saw the potential to grow much faster with access to RBC's larger balance sheet and sterling credit rating.

Mr. McKay and Mr. Goldsmith also grew closer. "I think we've become friends through the process," Mr. Goldsmith said in an interview in Beverly Hills. "We've, on occasion, played golf together and we enjoy each other's company."

The deal was announced in January of 2015 and closed in November the same year.

It's something of a truism that banks are sold and not bought. But in this case, City National wasn't being offloaded, notes Jared Shaw, an analyst at Wells Fargo Securities LLC. "They had everything going for them, at the time, and I think they still do."

Keeping in mind what went wrong last time, Mr. McKay plans to integrate City National with a lighter touch this time around.

After acquiring Centura, for example, RBC sent its own team of managers south to run the operation, and tried to do a full integration of operations and technology systems, none of which meshed properly. And at a deeper level, RBC acknowledges it never found a good cultural fit.

"The mistake we made with Centura [was that] we tried to RBC-ize a southeastern bank in the United States who has their own process and customers," Mr. McKay said. "We tried to make it too much like RBC, and it ended up neither like them nor like us, and in this very bad place in the middle. We learned from that."

With City National, Mr. Goldsmith and his senior management team remain in charge, with three Canadian directors on the bank's board, including Mr. Dobbins, who acted as a gate-keeper of sorts. From the start, RBC has carefully managed the flow of influence and information from one bank to the other.

Senior bankers from both sides would gather to go through client lists, looking for opportunities to refer business back and forth. Finance and risk systems have also been integrated, and the two banks hold quarterly business reviews.

Mr. Dobbins's routine included speaking weekly with business leaders at RBC to make quick decisions about which of their priorities should be brought to City National's attention. "They'd say: I want to do this. We'd debate whether that was light-touch or not, and we'd talk about, is it critical or is it nice to have? And that's how we made decisions," he said.

RBC wants City National to treat its parent like a store, picking and choosing from the menu of products and resources it needs to accelerate its growth.

"I think every company treats an acquisition as a new shiny toy," Mr. McKay said. "We can't have 75 different executives picking up the phone and asking them to do something or getting involved. They don't need it. They've been extremely successful as a standalone company for 60 years."

Maintaining City National's character and reputation will be critical to future success. Founded in 1954 in Los Angeles, the bank has been led by a Goldsmith for more than 40 years: Russell's father Bram from 1975 to 1995, and Russell ever since. And it has deep roots in the entertainment sector – founder Al Hart was a Columbia Pictures board member.

Its clientele, whose identities are closely guarded by industry norms of privacy and discretion, has been known to include Hollywood superstars, including legendary singer Frank Sinatra. In 1963, when the singer's son was kidnapped, City National opened its vault to put up $240,000 to pay the ransom. More recently, it has built a tidy business financing Broadway from its New York offices.

But it is also a successful commercial banker to less glamorous industries, from legal services and biotech to fast-food franchising and wine making. Add to that a low-cost deposit base, a strong reputation in wealth management and a balance sheet that was poised to benefit from expected interest-rate hikes, and it's no wonder the California-based bank looked like an attractive takeover target.

"City National is kind of a crown jewel, a unique business with a very high-end clientele," said Meny Grauman, an analyst at Cormark Securities Inc. "And so it fits in nicely to what Royal Bank already has in the United States and to what Royal Bank's ambitions are."

Yet no integration of two large companies goes totally smoothly, and it takes time to build trust. It's natural for employees to worry about job changes and harbour suspicions about the the new parent's intentions. "We had actually planned for them to be a little bit unfocused as we closed the acquisition," Mr. McKay said. But "they just rocketed right through the close. They just didn't miss a beat."

One thing that helped, according to Mr. Goldsmith, is that no one was laid off or fired because of the merger – "which I think makes it unique among bank mergers of any consequence in the last 30 or 40 years in the United States," he said. Instead, the bank has hired more than 450 new people, luring teams of bankers away from rivals, and now has about 4,400 staff.

But the threat of homogenization remains a key concern. "When you're a small piece in a larger organization, there's a risk that the larger organization changes the magic formula," said Mr. Grauman of Cormark.

Banking on growth

The first of what Mr. McKay calls "critical moments of truth" came about a month after the two banks formally merged, in December of 2015.

Thanks to Mr. Goldsmith's connections, RBC's capital markets arm had a chance to get involved in a $250-million public stock offering out of California. The shares belonged to Santa Monica-based Kite Pharma Inc., a major player in emerging cancer treatments. The deal was tricky and exceeded RBC's built-in risk controls, so it was kicked up to Mr. McKay and the bank's chief financial officer at the time, Janice Fukakusa, for approval.

"We got it done, we made a quick decision, we got comfortable with it," Mr. McKay said, and RBC took part as joint book-running managers.

The deal may seem comparatively small, but Mr. McKay insists "those are seminal moments" because they compel the two banks to work together on a complex problem. "It builds connective tissue," Mr. McKay said. "We're all in this together. This is not us and them, which is a little bit what happened in the old Centura days."

There have been other deals like it since then, though RBC is reticent to name its clients, and there will need to be many more if the bank is to reach its ambitious targets for the coming years.

City National has been growing fast, and "we've accelerated our growth plans as a result of the merger," Mr. Goldsmith said.

At the time RBC acquired it, the bank had about $36-billion (U.S.) in assets and had delivered uninterrupted quarterly profits for 23 straight years. Its assets have now swelled to $47-billion and it contributed $79-million in profit in RBC's fiscal third quarter – a 26-per-cent increase from a year earlier even after accounting for ongoing integration costs.

Looking ahead to 2020, RBC projected that City National could more than double its 2015 pretax profit to $1-billion (Canadian), which would represent a compound annual growth rate of about 22 per cent.

To make the grade, RBC needed interest rates to rise to help its U.S. arm make better margins, and the Fed has so far delivered with three quarter-point rate hikes since December. Each separate hike was expected to be worth about $50-million in profit for RBC's U.S. wealth management franchise, including $35-million from City National.

Growth is also expected to come from expansion into new markets. With RBC's support, City National has opened a third office in New York, and is eyeing a short list of other major cities such as Boston. It has set up shop in Washington, where there's a robust market for legal services, which is one of City National's existing strengths.

And it has opened its first full-service regional banking centre in Minneapolis, in support of RBC's existing wealth management business, which has nearly 2,000 investment advisors. "We had some great assets, but we couldn't unlock the value there," Mr. McKay said. "So how do you unlock that value? … We want to serve a high-net-worth commercial client."

City national has helped RBC reach that client, but McKay is clear that the expansion plan has limits. "We stay to that footprint. That's it," he said. "There's so much opportunity, we're so small within those markets that the last thing you want to do is spread yourself too thin geographically and not cover a market properly."

Another substantial chunk of City National's growth is expected to come from the two banks joining forces to drum up new business. With access to RBC's balance sheet, City National can lend larger sums and finance more jumbo mortgages. And there is also a pipeline to refer business back and forth with RBC.

The earliest benefits were apparent in RBC's New York-based capital markets division, which the bank has continued to build into a top-10 American investment bank with 3.5-per-cent market share. Within two to three years, RBC hopes to grow to its share to 4.5 per cent and move up the rankings.

"Russell introduced us to a number of clients that were thinking of making acquisitions or raising equity," Mr. McKay said. "That's led to business."

But City National's hallmark, its real competitive edge, remains the white glove service it offers.

Nancy Novokmet runs Need Financial, a Los Angeles-based firm that provides back-end accounting and operations to entertainment companies that shoot and produce TV commercials and films.

Her staff has access to a group of dedicated City National representatives who know her firm. And when a foreign production client needed funds released quickly to begin building a set abroad earlier this year, City National got it done within 48 hours.

"They understand the community. In production, there's this sense of urgency that's required," Ms. Novokmet said in an interview. "City National just responds very quickly, and it's not always the case with some of their competitors."

By forging long-standing connections with customers and keeping to major markets where it can compete, City National has built "a defendable moat," Mr. McKay said. "They didn't try to be everybody to everyone. They win on service, they win on speed of turnaround, they win on customization."

But the City National need for speed could still test RBC's appetite for risk.

While Royal of Canada does business in many states across the U.S., the markets it considers a priority for future growth have changed. It once sought to build a network of retail branches for day-to-day banking across a strip of the southeastern U.S. But now it plans to grow its presence in key cities with a concentration of high-net-worth and commercial clients.



Wild cards

Mr. McKay was tapping out an e-mail to Mr. Goldsmith as a reporter entered his office this summer. The two CEOs were debriefing after a television interview Mr. Goldsmith had just given on business network CNBC, in which he suggested it was "time to take a fresh look at Dodd-Frank."

He was referring, of course, to the massive legislative response to Wall Street's 2008 meltdown, which sought to substantially de-risk the shuddering financial system. Like many bankers who feel handcuffed by its strictures, Mr. Goldsmith was arguing for leniency: "For seven years we've piled on a lot of rules and regulations, and it needs to be re-examined," he told the program's viewers.

Back in Toronto, Mr. McKay tuned in from his corner office above Bay Street. Navigating a maze of regulations – and the cost that comes with it – is the thing that worries him most, he said. As a standalone bank, City National used to enjoy the lighter regulatory burden of a mid-sized institution. But combined with RBC and its much larger balance sheet through a holding company, City National gets the large, complex bank treatment, which comes with greater scrutiny from Washington.

That has generated mountains of new work. The combined bank has roughly 300 people involved with just one regulation: The stress-testing exercises known as the Comprehensive Capital Analysis and Review, or CCAR.

"That regulatory change has been difficult for a small bank, and us even, to handle," Mr. McKay said.

At the same time, private banking and wealth management are being reshaped by new regulations and shifting demographics. As the sector "has witnessed a regulatory avalanche over the last few years," banks looking to expand have to navigate a slew of reputational and regulatory risks, according to a 2016 report from Deloitte & Touche LLP.

RBC hasn't been immune to such pressures. The bank has largely pulled out of wealth management in the Caribbean and Latin America, due partly to concerns about anti-money laundering controls. Last year, RBC faced pointed questions about its relationship with the law firm behind the leaked Panama Papers, Mossack Fonseca, through which RBC allegedly registered hundreds of shell companies.

But the regulatory regime in the U.S. is considerably stricter, and City National does its private banking onshore. Mr. Goldsmith notes that City National has succeeded "because our experienced banking colleagues take the time, and dedicate the resources – including the use of state of the art technology – to ensure that we know our clients well."

The other thing that keeps Mr. McKay up at night is "geopolitical instability," and "what could be the contagion effect back to the U.S. economy." Since RBC closed its purchase of City National in late 2015, the world has gone through a series of convulsions, from Brexit and the U.S. election to NAFTA rate hikes and the beginning of a long march back from ultralow interest rates.

The Fed rate hikes are helping ease a prolonged squeeze on banks' profit margins. But the Trump administration's economic agenda, which once produced a surge of confidence among American businesses, is now clouded with uncertainty. Promises of deregulation and tax reform have moved slowly through a chaotic administration, while negotiations to redraw the North American free trade agreement are jarred by periodic threats from the President to withdraw from the pact altogether.

Mr. Goldsmith sees encouraging signs in the U.S. economy, from a surging stock market to strength in housing, industrials and trade. And some of the potential reforms on the table – whether to overhaul Dodd-Frank, or to lower corporate taxes – could provide City National with a major tailwind.

"Even a 5- or 10-per-cent drop in our [corporate tax rate] would be enormously significant, but that's not built into anybody's projections," he said.

But he also knows there are good reasons to be wary. Uncertainty has a habit of making businesses to hold back on investments, which would be bad news for a commercially focused bank with ambitious plans for growth.

"Do I have concerns as to what the policies in Washington may or may not do? Yeah, and we follow it closely," Mr. Goldsmith said. "And I'm obviously particularly concerned to see what happens with any potential renegotiation of NAFTA."

RBC's challenge through it all is to fight the same tendency toward short-term thinking that may afflict some of the businesses it serves, and to continue investing in new business lines and digital capabilities.

And it means not shying away from further, smaller U.S. acquisitions if the price is right. RBC has been putting together a playbook to evaluate potential targets that could accelerate its growth in one of the priority markets. But with U.S. bank valuations at elevated levels, RBC is biding its time, and insists it doesn't need an acquisition in the near term.

"At the end of the day I would say we did this deal and we have a strategy for the next 20 years, which is five [U.S. presidential] administrations," Mr. McKay said. "Honestly, we did not even remotely think about political cycles when we did the deal. Nor should you, right?"

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RBC CEO Not Worried About Risk Poised by Cooldown in Housing

The Globe and Mail, Christina Pellegrini, 6 September 2017

Home prices in the Toronto area slid again in August, but the top executive at Royal Bank of Canada is not worried about what a market slowdown would mean for his bank's lending business.

Dave McKay, chief executive officer at RBC, offered a rare glimpse on Wednesday into how he sizes up the potential risks lurking in the bank's residential loan book. At an industry conference hosted by Bank of Nova Scotia, Mr. McKay said only a tiny portion of RBC's roughly $260-billion residential portfolio could be at risk for losses if home prices collapse.

For years, a small number of short-sellers have been betting against Canadian bank stocks in the belief that a housing bust would crush their profitability. But Mr. McKay's back-of-the-envelope math suggests RBC's loan book could weather a correction.

To start, Mr. McKay suggests removing RBC's roughly $100-billion in insured mortgages from the discussion since they don't pose a real credit risk to the bank, leaving about $160-billion in uninsured mortgages to assess.

Mr. McKay then eliminates those uninsured loans that are for less than 70 per cent of the value of the property. He estimates that's about $140-billion of the bank's mortgage book. "That's quite significant," he said.

The remaining mortgages are those that are uninsured and have a loan-to-value ratio between 70 and 80 per cent. But even within this sliver of the loan book, there are different variables that make some loans riskier than others, according to Mr. McKay.

Firstly, he says that households that earn at least $150,000 a year pose much less risk of defaulting. "Families with income greater than $150,000 have much greater flexibility to manage shocks to cash flow, job loss, illness, divorce than families under $150,000," said Mr. McKay.

Next, he says homeowners who spend more than 35 per cent of what they earn each year on debt payments "have a much higher history of defaulting" on their loans. He said he also considers credit scores.

In the end, he's left with a pool of $6-billion in mortgages that are uninsured, have a loan-to-value ratio between 70 and 80 per cent, have a total debt service ratio higher than 35 per cent, generate less than $150,000 in annual income and were originated in the last few years when the price of homes really started to skyrocket.

By Mr. McKay's math, that's just $6-billion of risky loans in a portfolio worth almost $260-billion.

"We focus on that portfolio and we start to stress it" against job loss and potential default, he explains. Mr. McKay estimates that even with a default rate of 10 per cent and if home prices corrected by, say, 50 per cent, "you might lose 30 per cent of that $600-million."

"So you're talking about a couple hundred million dollars of that cohort of risk that you should concerned about," he added.

Mr. McKay said RBC is increasingly conducting full appraisals on these properties, doing "full walk-throughs to make sure that we're more confident of the value of that home – particularly in a rising house price environment." The bank is then flowing these higher-risk files to its most-senior adjudicators, who do a manual review of the properties, as well as verify the income of the borrower.

"For the first time, I think, I've articulated how that waterfall works and how we think about segmenting that risk and why you can break it down pretty quickly to a more focused area that you manage," Mr. McKay said.

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TD Bank Q3 2017 Earnings

Scotia Capital, 1 September 2017

• TD posted operating EPS of $1.51 in Q3/17, up 19% YoY and ahead of both our forecast ($1.38) & consensus ($1.36). In what we viewed as one of the strongest performances of Q3/17 earnings season for the sector (right up there with NA), the historical strong suits of TD were very much on display as the bank benefited from the combination of robust all-bank operating leverage (+5.2%), net interest margin (NIM) expansion in both Canada (+4bp) and the US (+9bp), and pristine credit quality metrics (core provision for credit losses [PCL] ratio down to 33bp). With the common equity tier 1 (CET1) ratio now at ~10.7% pro forma the Q4/17 closing of the Scottrade Bank acquisition, TD has updated its normal course issuer bid (NCIB) to allow for the purchase of an additional 20m shares (15m share program was completed in March).

• After the 3% increase in our estimate TD shares trade at 11.4x our 2018E, a 2% premium to the sector avg. of 11.2x and 4% back of RY. In upgrading TD to a SO-rating in our Aug. 21 report we espoused the view that a return to form in a few of the key operating fundamentals of the bank would allow it to regain its premium P/E and narrow the valuation gap with RY. Candidly, we think the Q3 print was a very good first step in this regard, and we expect TD shares to continue to make up ground in the interim.

• A healthy dose of conservatism in our 2018E. Although a 3% lift to our forward estimate is not small within the confines of the large Canadian banks, we think we have been conservative in getting to our EPS. To wit, our new $5.90 mark for 2018E implies $1.48 per qtr., which is actually less than what TD just posted in Q3/17. While Q3 did feel like a result in which many variables broke right for the bank (big NIM expansion, flat non-comp costs, PCL at the low-end of the target range), on the call mgmt. stopped short of saying that they viewed the print as unsustainably strong. Bottom line, the bias to our estimates is clearly to the upside, particularly given the leverage that TD has to higher rates as a result of its stronger core deposit franchises in Canada and the U.S.

• Across the sector, credit quality trends look very healthy. Q3 marked the second consecutive quarter in which the core PCL ratio at TD migrated into the low-30bp range, in-line with our view that the bank had greater capacity than most peers for credit costs to move lower. With the underlying trends looking healthy for TD across its various portfolios, we have lowered our PCL assumptions and now have the bank averaging a core PCL ratio of 37bp in 2018E and 38bp in 2019E.

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The Globe and Mail, James Bradshaw, 31 August 2017

Toronto-Dominion Bank put an exclamation point on a strong third quarter for Canadian banks with a 17-per-cent leap in profit fuelled by strong results in Canada and the United States.
All six of Canada's biggest banks surpassed analysts' expectations for the quarter that ended July 31, riding a surging domestic economy to better results.

With profit climbing 14 per cent higher in its retail banking arms on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border, TD stood out from a group of outperformers. The bank also enjoyed lower loan losses and strong capital generation, and announced that it intends to extend an existing plan to return capital to shareholders by buying back as many as 20 million more shares if regulators approve.

"I feel good about our performance at this stage of the year," chief executive officer Bharat Masrani said on a Thursday conference call. "This outperformance is partly attributable to a more favourable operating environment in the U.S., and more recently in Canada."

But even as the banks are riding high, TD chief financial officer Riaz Ahmed sounded a note of caution on the economic forces that have allowed banks to grow faster than even they predicted. Housing activity has been slowing while the Canadian dollar strengthens, and there remains uncertainty about the outcome of trade negotiations with the United States and Mexico.

"The Canadian economy has been surprisingly strong, but when you look forward, there's a number of headwinds that need to be taken into account," Mr. Ahmed said in an interview. "I would expect the growth rate to moderate a little bit."

TD's profit for the third quarter was $2.77-billion, or $1.46 a share, up from $2.36-billion, or $1.24 in the same quarter last year.

Adjusted to exclude certain items, TD earned $1.51 a share. Analysts surveyed by Bloomberg had estimated that TD would earn only $1.36 a share.

Revenue was $9.3-billion, or nearly 7 per cent higher than a year ago.

Profit from the bank's core Canadian retail division, which includes wealth management, topped $1.7-billion for the third quarter, up from $1.5-billion a year ago. The increase was mainly due to revenue growth and lower insurance claims.

TD's performance in retail banking in the United States also pushed forward, with profit reaching $901-million, compared with $788-million in the third quarter of 2016. That increase came in spite of a "sentiment of uncertainty" that Mr. Ahmed acknowledged has taken hold in the United States, as promised changes to trade and tax policies remain in limbo. But in the east coast markets where TD is concentrated, "business conditions seem to be good and activity is robust," he said.

Interest-rate hikes in the United States and, more recently, in Canada have also helped.

"TD showed the strongest beat of the 'Big 6' this earnings season, coming in well ahead of expectations," said John Aiken, an analyst at Barclays Capital Canada Inc., in a research note. "Its U.S. platform continued its upward earnings trajectory and its domestic retail operations saw a step up in its profitability after being mired in lower growth over the past few quarters."

Profit from the bank's capital markets arm dipped 3 per cent from a year earlier, to $293-million. But revenue from lending and trading grew, and the decline was due mostly to investments in the bank's U.S. dollar businesses. The unit also faced a tough comparison with TD's results from the same quarter a year ago.

"If you look at the last nine quarters, [$293-million is] the second-highest outing we've had," Mr. Ahmed said. "The fact that it's a mathematical 3-per-cent decline is not something that worries me."

The climate for credit has been almost universally described as benign this quarter, and TD's provision for credit losses – the sum set aside to cover bad loans – fell to $505-million, from $556-million a year ago. Loan losses were lower across the bank's credit card, personal lending and auto lending portfolios, and the bank had fewer provisions for the oil and gas sector in its capital markets arm.

TD's common equity tier 1 ratio – a key measure of a bank's capital levels – rose to 11 per cent, from 10.4 per cent a year ago, setting the stage for TD to boost the size of its share buyback.

"Our capital generation has been quite strong," Mr. Ahmed said. "We thought it made sense to reward our shareholders and pay some of that back."

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