Bharat Masrani – TD – Group President and CEO
Well, one thing. We’ve always been very mindful in any acquisition. And I mean, let’s be transparent, we learned the hard way, that there is no point buying something that is really made available for sale because generally it’s dressed up for sale and not much is left after you become proud owners.
In our case, we’ve been good acquirers. I think legacy Commerce Bank was a terrific acquisition that was not dressed up for sale because circumstances made it available in the market. South Financial also fits that description, and frankly First Horizon as well because they were going through their own integration, bringing those banks together. So, it was not actually dressed up for sale.
Same applies to Cowen. They were not looking – they are a terrific company, did very well. But we had identified Cowen. Riaz and his team were looking at Cowen for a while. It fills out a particular capability we think is important for us to have few years down the road, thinking of, in the US, equity capital markets and the investment banking business. So the core business is there. And with TD’s strength and balance sheet and rating and funding advantages, that kind of supercharges that growth.
And the part that sometimes is not well known is that First Horizon is a terrific middle market business, and Cowen is uniquely positioned on the middle market side as well. So that’s an added benefit we see. And then lastly in Cowen, we felt very comfortable with the management team and the individuals. Very TD-like from a culture perspective.
So again, I go back to it’s not often you sort of do a deal where strategically it makes sense, financially attractive, 14% ROIC deal. Risk appetite, very comfortable. In fact, it did generate all these revenues without a balance sheet. And so, we feel good about that. And culturally, we felt very comfortable.
So, it does a lot for our TD Securities business. It’s very complementary to what we’ve said we want to do. Your point, doing two deals, they’re separate deals. And we’re not looking at disturbing either one of them, that’s a different segment. We’re a large bank and we think we can manage that.
Meny Grauman – Scotia Capital – Analyst
Related to Cowen, it seems like there’s a general orthodoxy among bankers that says that buying investment dealers, especially foreign banks buying Wall Street investment dealers, it’s just a very risky proposition. It might work in the short term, but in the long term, how do you retain the talent? And so, I thought I would pose that to you and wonder out loud maybe, does the experience with Newcrest, is that some part of the answer? Does that give you confidence in your ability to do this? Obviously south of the border in this case, but is that part of the calculus for you?
Bharat Masrani – TD – Group President and CEO
Well, in fact, the premise you set up doesn’t only apply to investment banking. I think people say that any foreign bank going to the U.S. in any financial services ultimately fails and goes back home, takes a write-down or whatever. I think we have proven that at TD, we are different. We’ve been there for many years and quite successful with our U.S. strategy.
I think one thing we’ve always done is whenever we’ve acquired – and this is historic, this is not over the past few years – we very much value the management team we acquire. But when you think about it, any of these acquisitions, we’re paying a good premium. They don’t come for free. And most of the value that’s been created is through that management team. So why go there and destroy it? And I don’t understand. Many buyers do that, but at least at TD, we don’t.
If you look at our management team in the U.S. on the retail side at TD Bank, America’s Most Convenient Bank, most of the talent, the top talent there, the most senior management is acquired talent from the banks we bought – Commerce Bank, South Financial, Banknorth – and that’s the way we’ve set it up. And you talk about Newcrest. Well, Bob Dorrance came from Newcrest. Robbie Pryde came from Newcrest. You look at the whole part of TD Securities and Bob ran it and still is very much involved as Chairman of TD Securities.
Same applies to my predecessor, Ed Clark. We acquired Canada Trust and we said, well, let’s not go destroy it. We paid I don’t know how many times book, but it was quite expensive, but turned out to be great and we were able to retain the talent.
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TD Bank Group – Scotiabank Financials Summit Presentation – September 7, 2022 | | Page 3 of 4 |