RBC Bank President Visits Thunder Bay:
Gordon Nixon
by Scott A. Sumner
www.thunderbaybusiness.ca
It was fun to sit down and ask Gordon M Nixon, President & CEO of RBC Royal Bank some questions. He is a 1979 Commerce graduate of Queens University and has had a long service with RBC. Nixon spent most of his career with parts of the bank starting with Dominion Securities, which the bank acquired in 1987. He stepped into the CEO role 11 years ago.
Have you ever been to Thunder Bay before?
I hadn’t been to Thunder Bay before but have been to Northern Ontario many times and love the area. It is a lovely area with great wilderness. I saw the Whitewater Golf Club today during our lunch meeting and that was spectacular.
What is your impression of the Thunder Bay economy?
It is getting stronger economically in Thunder Bay, absolutely. Canada is getting stronger. Communities like Thunder Bay are quite focused on how they continue to transform the economy from the old to the new. Transportation hubs, forestry and mining came and now it is a continuation of transformation. What has impressed me is the cooperation and coordination of the various governments and institutions.
RBC is building new branches in Thunder Bay. Do you feel this is a good
market for you?
We are building new branches here in Thunder Bay and right across Canada. There was a theory that branch banking was dead because most people transact through the internet, the telephone or online but more and more we are growing our branches. People go to the branch for advice or they go for major transactions such as a mortgage on a home. The day-to-day activity of branches is changing. I think what you will see is we are opening new branches but when you go in it is a very different experience, a different offering. We have banks of the future
and it looks more like an Apple store than a bank. It is really built around how we make financial products and the advice around financial products much more available. Many people go in to gain information and then they will do something later.
The Northwestern Ontario region offers a good opportunity for us. The mining story is good and been well talked about but the new medical school at Lakehead, the research institute and a strong labour force in the region are important as well. There should be good economic opportunities in the region and hopefully we will see more and more of that. Transportation is opening up. Porter doesn’t fly to Thunder Bay 5 times a day because of their good nature. It is because there is demand, there are more and more people coming back and forth to Thunder
Bay. I think there are a lot of good things happening there and it is quite exciting.
What is a typical day like for a bank president?
There is no typical day. It changes all the time depending on what we are doing as an organization in the world. The last three years I spend a quite a bit of my time on problems, not necessarily RBC problems, but given everything that has been going on in the banking system, the economic crisis, financial crisis and the collapse of many banks in Europe and the US. That is starting to stabilize now so I can spend a lot of my time out visiting customers, drumming up business and on strategy of what we will do next. Today we announced the sale of one of assets for $ 3.6 billion for part of our retail banking in the US. We now decide where we will deploy that capital and what businesses we will invest in. I spend a lot of time with customers, governments and shareholders. There is a lot of diversity, which is nice.
