OTTAWA: National Bank of Canada has set a goal of being a “Top 3” Canadian investment bank within five years, setting up a showdown with bigger rivals as the Montreal-based lender seeks to win more business from the nation’s largest companies. “We think we can compete,” Yanick Blanchard, head of corporate and investment banking at National Bank Financial, said in an interview at the firm’s Toronto office. “We have the critical mass now and the scale to go after the entire space.”
National Bank, the country’s sixth-largest lender with C$232 billion ($178 billion) of assets, said it’s seeking to gain relationships with bigger Canadian companies by leveraging its growing balance sheet and expanding areas of coverage while maintaining ties to medium-sized businesses. It’s a tall order for a small firm that ranks behind dominant players such as Royal Bank of Canada and Bank of Montreal in almost every investment-banking category. “I would expect it to be a rough ride,” said John Kinsey of Caldwell Securities Ltd. in Toronto, who oversees about C$1 billion including bank shares. “It’s a tough road with RBC and BMO, and the other banks aren’t too shabby either.”
