By Jenny Wagler
Despite a general perception that banks clamped down on credit access during the recession, TD Bank Group’s Jane Russell said that at TD, that wasn’t the case. And as the recovery starts to take hold, Russell, senior vice-president, Pacific region, TD business banking, speaks about how TD is focusing on opportunities for market growth in B.C.
If you look back at 2009, the contraction in GDP in B.C. was 1.8% versus 2.5% across the country, so B.C. was a bit of an outlier in a good way during the recession.
And then our stats say the GDP growth in 2010 in B.C. will be 3.5% versus 2.9% across the country, so again some really good economic numbers in B.C. – that’s why we like being here, that’s why we want to grow here. And probably the last part of it is the population growth is strong in B.C.
This growth in B.C. that the bank wants to show in the business segment – part of that’s increasing our visibility and presence. We now have a local Vancouver-based PR and marketing team to help increase that visibility. Prior to last July, there was no one in the PR function here – that was all done out of our head office in Toronto.
Also, my job didn’t exist here three years ago. So the senior vice-president that was overseeing the West was in Alberta. So I think you say a big commitment of the bank is having a senior vice-president for the business bank in B.C. for B.C.
I would say we had more opportunities from potential clients over the recession, which was nice to see. The fact is that we hadn’t changed our lending policies. TD Bank had a very strong balance sheet throughout the recession so we had the money to lend.
And so we were quite interested in gathering new clients, so in fact not only did we lend more money to our clients that required more financing, but we actually gained new clients through the recession.
I would say from the amount of loans outstanding actually from what I see in [Canadian Bankers Association] statistics, if you actually say, “What’s the total size of the pie?” it actually has shrunk over the last couple of years. And that might make sense with people pulling back in different areas. And there’s been, in our view, some companies increasing and holding cash more than actually maybe lending.
So I think there was a phase through the recession where people said, “I’ll hold onto my cash, I’ll hold off on buying that building or that piece of the equipment until I see how the landscape’s going to shake out.” So I think we saw people holding more cash and maybe holding off or stalling on doing some of their capital investment. To add to that, and from a B.C. perspective, the large end of the market/corporate sector still appears to be challenged, but the good news is that the mid-market appears to have turned the corner and is beginning to grow again.
Yes. I’d say now as we start to see these [Canadian Bankers Association] statistics again, I would like to think, and our experience and what we’re feeling is that that’s growing again.
Are there areas or sectors of particular opportunity that you’re seeing in B.C. right now?
Our range in products and services has increased over the past couple of years to support all new potential clients. So we’re increasing our agriculture business, we’ve added an asset finance group across the country that has representation here in B.C. and we’ve re-focused our commercial mortgage business here in B.C. as well.
We have a nice portion in the real estate market share. And on the service side, the province of B.C. has a large service component through tourism and others, as well as manufacturing.
That’s a tough one in the business bank because all of the competitors have similar products and services. I think where we really need to compete is on the quality and the knowledge of our business bankers that we have in our communities. So that means for us that when we hire someone, and typically our hiring is out of the universities and colleges, we have a top-notch training program for people coming out of school. And then we have ongoing career development to give them the skills that they need to be that knowledgeable banker in their local community.
And in terms of being local, one of our focuses to grow in B.C. in the business bank part of it is to add more business bankers. And we’ve done that in the last 2.5 years, and again, this is through a recession. We’ve added 36% more business bankers than we had 2.5 years ago.
Absolutely. So that is the commitment of the bank, to grow the business bank in B.C., so 36% is quite a number, especially over 2009 and 2010.
We have small-business advisers that provide support and are our contact to the small-business clients in our communities, and by the end of this year we’ll have 75% of our retail branches having the support of a small-business adviser. So that’s tremendous growth for us.
I think we’ll back off a touch, but it’s still significant at 5% [this year] and we’ve been hiring at 15%-20%. It’s not a concern to me because we’ve hired so many people, it’s not such a concern this year to have these people get into their roles and develop and gain new clients and manage the portfolios they have today and still add 5% more people on top of that.