The modern identity of TD Canada Trust is a composite of three major Canadian financial institutions: The Bank of Toronto, The Dominion Bank, and Canada Trust. Its character was shaped by two pivotal mergers—the first in 1955, creating the Toronto-Dominion Bank, and the second in 2000, which integrated Canada Trust and fundamentally reshaped the bank's retail identity. This history reflects a strategic fusion of a traditional, conservative chartered bank with an agile, customer-focused trust company, a combination that has defined both its market success and its subsequent challenges.
Predecessor Institution(s)
By the mid-1950s, both The Bank of Toronto and The Dominion Bank were established national institutions, but were smaller than their main competitors. [16] [17] To achieve the scale necessary to compete more effectively with the larger Canadian banks, the two institutions agreed to merge. The amalgamation was approved by Canada's Minister of Finance on November 1, 1954, and became official on February 1, 1955. [16]
The newly formed entity was named The Toronto-Dominion Bank. At its inception, it operated 449 branches across Canada, maintained offices in London and New York, and employed approximately 4,700 people. [18]
Canada Trust
Canada Trust traces its origins to the Huron and Erie Savings and Loan Society, which was founded in London, Ontario, in 1864 to provide mortgages funded by savings deposits. The entity that would become Canada Trust began as the General Trust Corporation of Canada, incorporated in Calgary in 1894. [19] In 1899, this largely inactive corporation was acquired by the Huron and Erie Savings and Loan Society, which moved its headquarters to London, Ontario, and renamed it The Canada Trust Company. [20]
Canada Trust officially began operations as a subsidiary of Huron & Erie in 1901. [18] Over the following decades, it grew into one of Canada's largest and most popular trust companies. It distinguished itself from traditional banks by cultivating a customer-centric service model, famously offering extended branch hours under the slogan "Eight to Eight, Six Days Straight." [21] This focus on convenience and accessibility helped it build a loyal customer base. By the late 1990s, Canada Trust was a dominant force in Canadian finance, with 3.5 million customers, over 400 branches, and $38 billion in deposits. [22]
Acquisition of Canada Trust (2000)
In January 2000, TD Bank announced an agreement to acquire Canada Trust for approximately C$8 billion, aiming to significantly expand its personal and small business banking scale. The acquisition was completed on February 1, 2000, and over the course of 2000–2001, TD merged Canada Trust's operations with its own, rebranding the combined retail network as "TD Canada Trust" by 2001. As part of the integration, TD adopted Canada Trust's customer service model – notably its longer branch hours – across the merged network. Prior to the merger, Canada Trust had differentiated itself by offering extended banking hours (including evenings and Saturdays), and TD Canada Trust continued this approach, eventually advertising its promise of being "open earlier, open later, open longer" than competitors. [15] By November 2007, over 800 TD Canada Trust branches opened from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. on weekdays and 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturdays, giving TD the longest hours in Canadian banking. [15]
The integration process included significant branch consolidation. In markets where TD and Canada Trust had overlapping presence, some branches were closed or divested to satisfy competition concerns. The federal Competition Bureau required TD to sell 13 branches (with over 120,000 customer accounts) in Ontario communities where concentration would have been especially high (notably in the Kitchener-Waterloo area), and to divest Canada Trust's Mastercard portfolio (since TD was an exclusive Visa issuer at the time) [23] Most of the affected branches were sold to the Bank of Montreal, and TD also closed a number of other nearby branches to eliminate duplication. [23] W. Edmund Clark, the CEO of Canada Trust, joined TD's executive team during the merger – initially as president of TD Canada Trust and COO of TD Bank – and later became CEO of TD Bank Group in 2002, helping to guide the successful integration of Canada Trust's operations and culture into TD.
Expansion and Developments (2000s–2010s)
After the formation of TD Canada Trust, the bank pursued further growth in Canadian retail banking through both acquisitions and new initiatives. In 2001, TD Canada Trust absorbed the remaining branches of Central Guaranty Trust and other small institutions that TD had acquired in the 1990s. TD also continued to expand its branch network organically: for example, it opened 31 new branches in 2006 and over 30 in 2007, [15] reaching about 1,100 branches nationwide by the 2010s.
Throughout the 2000s, TD Canada Trust invested heavily in technology and digital channels. Canada Trust had been an early adopter of internet banking with its launch of the EasyWeb online platform in 1999, [24] and after the merger, TD continued to enhance EasyWeb as a leading online banking service in Canada, winning awards for online functionality in the mid-2000s. [25]
In 2010, TD Canada Trust launched one of Canada's first full-service mobile banking apps, initially for iOS and BlackBerry (later for Android), allowing customers to perform most banking transactions via smartphone. [26]
In the credit card business, TD made a major acquisition in 2011. On December 1, 2011, TD Bank Group completed the purchase of the Canadian credit card portfolio of MBNA, a large MasterCard issuer, from Bank of America. [27] This deal added millions of MasterCard accounts to TD's customer base and instantly made TD one of the largest credit card issuers in Canada. [28] TD continued to issue many MBNA credit card products under the MBNA brand as a division of TD, particularly affinity and co-branded Mastercard, even as its mainline TD cards remained Visa.
In 2012, the bank introduced a "Visa Debit" enabled client card (the TD Access Card) with Interac Flash, enabling online purchases and contactless payments directly from chequing accounts through the Visa network – a first for a major Canadian bank. [29] These innovations helped TD attract tech-savvy customers and reinforced its "Convenience" brand promise.
In 2013, TD won a competitive bid to become the primary issuer of Aeroplan-branded Visa credit cards, replacing CIBC as Aeroplan's main bank partner. [30] As part of that agreement, TD acquired approximately 50% of CIBC's Aerogold VISA portfolio (representing about 550,000 accounts) in December 2013. [31] [32] The Aeroplan cards transition in early 2014 further bolstered TD's credit card market share and introduced a large number of new clients to the bank's fold.
