In October 2024, the chair and chief executive officer (CEO) of George Weston Limited (GWL), was reviewing the draft environmental, social, and governance (ESG) reports of GWL and its operating companies, Loblaw Companies Limited and Choice Properties REIT. As the fourth generation to lead the 142-year-old family-controlled business, the CEO was focused on creating generational value and promoting a stakeholder perspective that addressed the needs .....more

Teaching note for product W42919.

TELUS Corporation (TELUS) issued Canada’s first sustainability-linked bond (SLB), in mid-June 2021. An SLB was a newer category of green bond that allowed companies to raise funds for general corporate purposes instead of specific environmental projects. This SLB supported TELUS’s sustainability journey and commitments, towards which it had made significant progress since setting its first climate targets in 2011. Building on this success, TELUS set .....more

Teaching note for product W42747.

In February 2020, a social geographer at the University of Victoria was approached by one of the co-founders and managing partners of Raven Indigenous Capital Partners to develop an Indigenous impact measurement framework for the company. Raven Indigenous Capital Partners was founded in 2017 in Vancouver, British Columbia. The founders launched the Raven Indigenous Impact Fund to invest in early-stage growth businesses started by Indigenous entrepreneurs. .....more

Teaching note for product W25239.

In December 2016, the founder and chief executive officer of R3 was preparing for an offsite meeting, where his management team would debate what business model to pursue to extract the most value from the company’s new distributed ledger product called Corda. Founded in 2014, R3 was a blockchain technology company with headquarters in New York. R3 was leading a consortium of over 100 banks, financial institutions, and technology companies to develop .....more

As bank executives for over 30 years, Kevin Clark and Troy Wright witnessed countless opportunities to support small businesses being missed. That is what attracted them to the fintech revolution now transforming banking and financial services around the world. In this Ivey Business Journal interview, Ivey Professor Michael King sat down with Clark to discuss his transformation from old-school banker to fintech entrepreneur, not to mention his company’s .....more

Canada’s Department of Finance recently began consultations on open banking—a global trend enacted last year in Britain and the European Union and soon rolling out in Australia. Under open banking, you would be able to authorize apps developed by fintech companies to access your bank account in order to provide services you want, such as reporting, budgeting, or forecasting. The issues that need to be addressed to make open banking work for Canadians .....more

This note discusses how to analyze a bank from the point of view of an equity analyst or investor. The note begins by reviewing the evolution of North American banks from narrow to diversified financial institutions and then describes the financial ratios used to evaluate a bank's operating and financial performance. The final section provides examples of these ratios applied to a North American bank, and a set of Canadian and U.S. banks.