Awards for Excellence 2020
Canada’s biggest bank is a regular winner of the award for Canada’s best investment bank, but in 2020 it has clocked up another accolade for the first time since 2004.
For its consistently strong financial performance across its entire franchise, a performance repeated through the awards period and one that persisted even as the coronavirus crisis took hold, this year Royal Bank of Canada is also our pick as Canada’s best bank.
For the four fiscal quarters running to the end of February 2020, before the effect of coronavirus had begun to show up in earnings, RBC averaged a return on equity of 17%, at least two percentage points above its closest peer. Revenues over the same period were up nearly 10%.
RBC’s investment banking and capital markets business is an outsized contributor to the group compared with the bank’s domestic peers. But strip it out and revenues were also up 10% over the same period.
Before the Covid-19 crisis, president and chief executive David McKay points to two challenges the bank faced.