RBC Capital Markets Is Playing In A Different League Than Its Canadian Rivals

The Globe and Mail, Marina Okhromenko, 24 April 2019

It’s time to acknowledge that when it comes to investment banking, RBC Capital Markets is playing in a different league than its Canadian rivals. The deal-making arm of Royal Bank of Canada churned out $8.4 billion in revenue last year, almost as much as its second- and third-ranked domestic competitors put together. In the same way it seems preordained that football’s New England Patriots will be Super Bowl favourites every year, it now appears certain that RBC Capital Markets will make far more money than any other Bay Street dealer.

What's the secret to this run? Like the most successful coaches in sports, Royal Bank CEO Dave McKay says staying on top in increasingly complex markets starts with keeping things simple. “The beauty of the capital markets strategy is consistency and what I call the simplicity,” he said at a conference in March. “It is [built] around great people, using your balance sheet, creating value, advising and cross-selling, and it takes time to build up those relationships.” To use another gridiron adage, it's also about the team, rather than individual superstars. When that teamwork kicks in, it can turbocharge revenues and earnings.

Like many perennial winners, McKay pushes his team to do better each year, too. RBC Capital Markets earned a $2.8-billion profit in 2018, which translated into a healthy 13% return on equity—a performance any other Canadian bank would envy. But McKay isn't measuring his team mainly against Bay Street rivals such as Bank of Nova Scotia, which posted capital markets revenue of $4.5 billion in 2018. Royal Bank is competing against global players such as JP Morgan Chase, which generated $35.4 billion (U.S.) in revenue from corporate and investment banking.

RBC Capital Markets began to pull away from the rest of the Canadian bank-owned dealers in the late 1990s, when it found itself advising many of its Canadian corporate clients on international expansion plans. The division's leaders in that era, including long-time CEO Anthony (Tony) Fell, decided that to stay relevant to those clients, it needed to grow with them abroad, with an initial focus on the U.S. market.

In 2000, Royal Bank spent $1.5 billion (U.S.) to acquire a technology-focused investment bank, Minneapolis-based Dain Rauscher Corp. When the tech bubble burst in 2001, Dain Rauscher started losing money. Royal Bank also targeted relatively small growth companies, which was out of step with its focus on large-cap clients in established industries. Veteran real estate banker Doug McGregor was dispatched from the head office in Toronto to Minneapolis to turn things around.

McGregor and his colleagues stuck with a U.S. expansion strategy, but eschewed another acquisition, opting to take a slow-and-steady approach by hiring individuals and some entire teams from U.S. banks. They did the same with British, French and German rivals in Europe.

If Dave McKay is Royal Bank’s head coach, the role of quarterback falls to the 61-year-old McGregor, who’s chair and CEO of RBC Capital Markets and head of the bank’s investor and treasury services. A champion wrestler in his university days, McGregor looks like he could still pin an opponent, and he is disarmingly blunt and direct. He says the big-ego Masters of the Universe financiers made famous by author Tom Wolfe were never welcome at RBC Capital Markets. McGregor has hired 31 senior bankers in recent months, and says his goal in every interview has been ensuring the new partners are a “safe” cultural fit, which means “understated and team-oriented.”

As the bank has expanded internationally—RBC Capital Markets now has 3,300 employees in the U.S., 2,700 in Canada and 1,300 in Europe—McGregor and his colleagues say the concept of teamwork became more essential. No one player can do everything for large and complex corporations.

Take health care. Derek Neldner, RBC Capital Markets head of global investment banking, says that a generation back, one banker could be the sole contact with a pharmaceutical company. Now, he says, “if you are going to offer serious coverage to a health care client, you need an analyst who can talk authoritatively on medical devices, an expert on pharmaceuticals, one on biotech and so on.”

To cover the cost of employing all those specialists, a bank needs global scale, Neldner says. He adds that one of RBC Capital Markets' most significant internal accomplishments in recent years was devising a compensation system that ensures bankers and traders get paid for helping on a transaction even if they don't have direct ties to that client.

RBC Capital Markets' reach now vastly exceeds that of any domestic rival. The firm played a role in $1.5 trillion (U.S.) worth of syndicated loans last year, $74 billion (U.S.) in stock sales and $764 billion (U.S.) in bond offerings for Canadian and international clients.

Teamwork often boosts revenues, which is why McKay fixates on cross-selling. Jonathan Hunter, RBC global head of fixed income currencies and commodities, remembers working on an acquisition in British Columbia for a German client. Along with helping negotiate the deal, RBC arranged debt financing and used derivatives to hedge currency risk. “If our fee was a dollar on a conventional advisory assignment, we were able to earn a buck-sixty here by providing extra services while also doing a better job for the client,” Hunter says.

Size and outsized profits in capital markets also bolster the premium valuation for Royal Bank stock, analysts say. “When the waves pick up, we prefer to be on a bigger boat,” said CIBC World Markets analyst Rob Sedran in a recent report on Royal Bank. Like the Patriots, in good markets and bad, McKay’s team just keeps winning.

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Why Shorting the Canadian Banks on Housing Makes No Sense

The Globe and Mail, Tim Kiladze, 10 April 2019

When Steve Eisman warns about a downturn, investors listen – so his recent bet against Canadian banks is getting a lot of attention. Famous for his prescient call against the United States housing market before the 2008 global financial crisis, one of the fantastically profitable wagers profiled in The Big Short, Mr. Eisman, a fund manager, is now predicting trouble for Canada’s largest lenders.

He is very clear that he does not expect a U.S.-style housing collapse, yet he worries that Canada’s housing market is cooling quickly. Mr. Eisman also fears the fallout from a sluggish economy. Because the Big Six banks dominate domestic lending, he expects they will suffer.

It is a compelling story, one that other hedge funds have been making as well. The problem with the thesis, however, is that there are a number of holes in it.

From afar, the statistics about Canadian debt are jarring. Household debt has risen to 179 per cent of disposable income. The bulk of that debt is from mortgages, and the vast majority of these loans are financed by the Big Six lenders. So the banks look particularly vulnerable in any downturn.

But the specifics about the market structure matter, and Canadian fund manager Rob Wessel, who runs Toronto-based Hamilton Capital Partners Inc., has zeroed in on these in a new research note to push back against the short trade. The same is true for Australia, he argued, a country whose banking system closely resembles ours.

“While the housing story has not yet been fully written, we believe the ongoing corrections will remain orderly and that a ‘big short’ position in the Canadian and Australian banks will continue to be challenging,” he wrote.

Mr. Wessel has an interesting vantage point. His firm specializes in investing in financial institutions around the world, and he personally knows the Canadian market intimately after spending years as an equity research analyst who covered the domestic banks.

Crucially, he noted, healthy levels of collateral and mortgage insurance “provide huge buffers to direct losses for the banks." He isn’t completely dismissive of the short story, but he believes "it would take a truly significant decline in home prices for Canadian and Australian banks to incur a large increase in direct mortgage credit losses.”

Major Canadian banks have an average loan-to-value ratio of 54 per cent on their mortgage portfolios. That means if a buyer were to default, the bank should be able to repossess the home and sell it for far more than the remaining loan value.

Mortgage insurance provided by Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corp. is also a crucial element of the Canadian market, protecting the lenders when they’re issuing mortgages with smaller down payments. On average, 44 per cent of Big Six bank mortgages are insured, so the lenders are protected if borrowers on these insured loans default.

As for the argument that a sluggish economy will cause problems, Mr. Wessel notes that the national employment rate of 5.8 per cent hasn’t been this low in decades. The broad labour market strength should do wonders because loan losses are positively correlated with unemployment rates. Plus, for all the doom and gloom, Canada’s gross domestic product is still predicted to grow over the next two years.

Lately, bearish investors have cautioned that the expected economic expansion is smaller than recently predicted. Yet, Mr. Wessel writes, that means interest rate hikes will likely remain on hold, and that has started to push borrowing costs down.

Despite the vocal arguments made by fund managers such as Mr. Eisman, recent statistics show broad swaths of investors aren’t growing intensely bearish – at least not yet. Since the start of the year, total short interest in the Big Six banks has remained flat around US$10-billion, according to S3 Partners, a financial analytics company. Of these lenders, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce has the highest percentage of its float shorted, at 5.6 per cent.

But bank CEOs have still had to defend their institutions. On Tuesday, Bank of Nova Scotia CEO Brian Porter spoke at the lender’s annual meeting, and he provided a detailed riposte to the short narrative.

“We stress-test our portfolio on a regular basis, a daily basis. And we stress-test it against what we would view as very harsh metrics," he said, offering examples such as a 600-basis-point increase in interest rates and a huge jump in unemployment. Even in those scenarios, "our business is still profitable, the bank still pays a dividend, and we carry on.”

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Scotiabank Spending $300-million a Year in Anti Money Laundering Efforts

The Globe and Mail, James Bradshaw, 9 April 2019

Bank of Nova Scotia is spending about $300-million annually to combat money laundering even as it pulls out of some riskier markets, at a time when Canada’s government is promising new resources to fight financial crime.

The bank’s chief executive officer, Brian Porter, voiced support for an array of new measures unveiled by the federal government in last month’s budget, speaking to reporters after Scotiabank’s annual meeting of shareholders on Tuesday. The new initiatives are the government’s response to continuing criticism over significant gaps in Canada’s anti-money-laundering regime.

Scotiabank spent nearly $300-million enhancing anti-money-laundering capabilities last year, and expects to invest “pretty close to that in 2019," he said. And he acknowledged that Scotiabank is keenly aware of growing scandals over money-laundering lapses at two Nordic lenders, Danske Bank and Swedbank, that have claimed executives’ jobs, damaged those banks’ reputations and drawn heightened attention to global flows of illicit funds.

“This is a big issue and it’s one I think about a lot," Mr. Porter said. “We’ve all read in the papers about Danske Bank and Swedbank and what went on there."

Scotiabank spends more heavily on anti-money-laundering controls than some of its peers, partly as a function of its geographic footprint. Not long ago, the bank operated in more than 50 countries, from Russia and Turkey to the Caribbean and Latin America, many of which have been targets for those looking to wash illegal funds. Since Mr. Porter took over as CEO five years ago, the bank has sold businesses in some 20 countries, focusing the bank’s international footprint but also reducing its exposure to money-laundering risks.

Money laundering is only one risk factor the bank has looked to mitigate by “divesting some smaller markets. It’s a function of managing operational risk,” he said.

Scotiabank has made key hires in recent months to bolster its anti-money-laundering efforts, including naming Stuart Davis as its global head of financial crimes risk management. Mr. Davis was formerly the global chief anti-money-laundering officer at Bank of Montreal.

The bank had previously scaled back its metals business, ScotiaMocatta, having failed to sell the unit in 2017 after it was linked to a money-laundering scandal. In 2015, Scotiabank reached a written agreement with U.S. regulators to fix its oversight and monitoring of suspicious activity, correcting gaps in its compliance program.

Some estimates suggest that the total sums of money laundered each year add up to between 2 per cent and 5 per cent of global gross domestic product (GDP), or trillions of dollars, though it is hard to be precise about funds that exist in the shadows by their nature. “And this isn’t just drugs, it’s human trafficking, it’s all sorts of terrible things going on," Mr. Porter said, noting that banks have "an important role” to play in stemming the flow of such funds.

In recent years, Canada has received lukewarm ratings for its effectiveness at combatting financial crimes such as money laundering and terrorist financing. In response, the latest federal budget promised a series of investments and measures to try and “modernize” Canada’s regime to enforce anti-money-laundering laws.

The government promised to invest $16.9-million over five years in the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FinTRAC), and to boost the RCMP’s investigative capacity with tens of millions of dollars in annual funding. There are also plans to create an Anti-Money Laundering Action, Coordination and Enforcement (ACE) Team, drawing together experts from intelligence and law-enforcement agencies to boost co-operation.

“I think that’s good for the system, good for the country, and we’re supportive of that," Mr. Porter said.

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