Best bank: RBC
Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) might be dominant in Canada but it is not complacent, as it doubles down on technology investment, with AI becoming an increasingly important value driver.
The bank generated CAD20.4 billion ($14.4 billion) in net income in the year to the end of October 2025 year, with a return on equity of 16.3%. It posted record business performances across personal banking, commercial banking, capital markets and wealth management, including strong fee growth in wealth management, capital markets, and transaction banking.
In personal banking, RBC holds the number one market share in Canada across product categories. In the last fiscal year, Canadian personal banking delivered double-digit income growth and an efficiency ratio below 40%, supported by higher margins, disciplined cost management and growing customer engagement. It added 400,000 net new premium clients during the year, with 40% of new customers becoming multi-product relationships.
In 2025, RBC expanded the Avion Rewards programme’s reach, growing its member base by 700,000 and embedding it more deeply across credit cards, mortgages and investments.
A strategic alliance with Canadian Tire allows cardholders to earn three times Canadian Tire Money in major retail brands. RBC also launched a next-generation travel platform through a collaboration with Hopper Technology Solutions, combining the Avion programme with an AI-driven booking engine that provides predictive pricing insights and flexible travel options.
In mortgages, RBC’s acquisition of Pinch Financial in 2026 enhances its ability to verify borrower information digitally and streamline the qualification process, bringing a faster and more transparent experience to clients. The bank is also working upstream in the homebuying journey, through its partnership with REALTOR.ca, integrating property search, financial advice and AI-enabled insights.
Beyond retail, wealth management is a central pillar, with assets under administration surpassing CAD2.3 trillion globally. Alongside its retail and wealth franchises sits RBC Capital Markets, the dominant investment bank in Canada and a global player. In 2025, RBC ranked number one across M&A, ECM, DCM and loan market share domestically, showing the bank’s full-spectrum banking strength.
Best bank for ESG: Scotiabank
Scotiabank is Canada’s best bank for ESG in recognition of a comprehensive and well-executed sustainability strategy that integrates climate action, social impact and governance into core business activities. Its framework is structured around three climate pillars – financing climate solutions, supporting clients and reducing its own emissions – providing a clear and measurable approach to managing climate-related risks and opportunities.
A defining feature of the bank’s performance is the scale of its sustainable finance activity. In 2025, Scotiabank delivered CAD40 billion ($28.2 billion) in climate-related finance, taking its cumulative total since 2019 to CAD212 billion and advancing its target of CAD350 billion by 2030. This commitment is supported by a dedicated sustainable finance team that advises clients across sectors on integrating sustainability into funding strategies and aligning capital markets activity with climate goals.
Operationally, the bank has demonstrated credible progress in reducing its environmental footprint. Since 2016, it has cut Scope 1 and 2 emissions by 36.3% and achieved 100% emissions-free electricity in Canada by 2025, underlining a clear trajectory towards decarbonisation.
Scotiabank also stands out for the breadth of its social and community initiatives. Its ScotiaRISE programme, a CAD500 million commitment launched in 2021, has already delivered more than CAD212 million to over 300 community partners, supporting millions of critical interventions aimed at improving economic resilience. The bank has complemented this with a formal Truth & Reconciliation Action Plan, embedding Indigenous engagement and inclusion across its operations.
Consistently high external ratings, including an MSCI ESG rating of AAA, further reflect the bank’s leading position in Canada.
Best investment bank: RBC Capital Markets
RBC Capital Markets dominated the Canadian market in 2025. The bank ranked first across the board in Canadian investment banking in 2025, leading in M&A, ECM, DCM and loans with overall investment banking market share of 9.6%, according to Dealogic and Bloomberg data.
The DCM leadership in particular extends an unbroken run: 2025 marked RBC’s 27th consecutive year as Canada’s top-ranked debt house, a position it now holds across every major league table provider, with leading positions for cross-border issuance, maple market, and public sector issuance.
The breadth showed in the year’s defining transactions. RBC advised on 11 of the top 20 Canadian acquisitions of 2025, including Anglo American’s $53 billion merger with Teck Resources and Cenovus Energy’s contested $8.6 billion acquisition of MEG Energy, where it advised the target. In equity, the bank led four of the five largest Canadian offerings of the year and delivered Boyd Group’s $897 million listing, the first US IPO ever completed on a bought-deal basis by a Canadian issuer.
What distinguishes RBC is its ability to deploy all four products on a single mandate. On Keyera’s CAD5.2 billion ($3.7 billion) acquisition of Plains’ Canadian natural gas liquids business, RBC acted as lead M&A adviser, bookrunner on the CAD2.1 billion equity raise, sole underwriter on CAD3.3 billion of credit facilities, and bookrunner on the CAD2.8bn multi-tranche bond offering generating the second-largest order book in Canadian bond history. A similar multi-product execution on Definity Financial’s acquisition of Travelers’ Canadian operations reflected a year-long collaboration across several of the bank’s areas.
With 95% of mandates coming from repeat clients and a research franchise ranked first in Canada by Extel, RBC’s dominance rests less on any single deal than on the consistency of its full-service model.
Best investment bank for financing solutions: CIBC Capital Markets
CIBC Capital Markets demonstrated the breadth of its financing solutions platform in 2025 through complex, multi-instrument transactions combining advisory, structuring and underwriting roles across debt, equity and hybrid capital.
The Innergex take-private deal is representative of this integrated approach. CIBC advised Innergex on its $10 billion acquisition by Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, the largest renewables transaction in Canadian history, while simultaneously serving as co-lead arranger on the concurrent $1.2 billion senior refinancing, comprising a revolving credit facility, construction facility and term loan.
The dual mandate required coordination across M&A advisory, credit structuring and syndication within a single transaction process, closing at a 58% one-day and 80% 30-day premium to the unaffected share price.
The Keyera transaction demonstrated comparable structural range. Acting as joint bookrunner and co-lead arranger on a $5.15 billion multi-instrument package supporting Keyera’s acquisition of Plains Midstream Canada’s natural gas liquids business, CIBC covered the full capital structure in a single coordinated execution – subscription receipts, multi-tranche senior notes, hybrid notes, bridge facility, term loan and revolver increase – while maintaining approximately 70% of pro forma fee-for-service margin under long-term agreements.
In sustainable finance, CIBC maintained a 20% market share in Canadian sustainability-linked loans and structured the Caribbean’s first sovereign sustainability-linked loan for the Government of Barbados, tied to a water security project.
Underpinning all of this, CIBC acted as mandated lead arranger on CAD68.9 billion ($48.6 billion) of Canadian corporate borrowing in 2025, a market-leading position by value reflecting the depth of its lending relationships and distribution capability.
Best retail bank: BMO
BMO has staged a remarkable transformation as a retail bank over the past five years – pulling ahead of peers in terms of customer growth, while also digitalising rapidly.
Between 2021 and 2025, the bank calculates that its growth of personal and business banking customers as a proportion of the Canadian population was 1.6 times that of peers.
Its share of retail operating deposits, mortgages and mutual funds have all grown over the five-year period while its gain in share of current switchers has been the highest among peers since 2019.
All this has had a strong impact on financial performance. It has posted compound annual growth rates of 10% in revenue, 6% in deposits and 7% in loans between 2020 and 2025 even while seeing its efficiency ratio improve by 500 basis points.
Investments in people, including 190 financial planners this decade, has helped – as has investment in new digital tools after 2019, including insights into spending habits, proactive financial tips and other savings tools. It has increased its digital sales by 1.6 times in the first half of the 2020s, an achievement it largely ascribes to investments in digital financial health tools.
In mid-2025, it took another step in this direction with the launch of My Financial Progress, which helps customers plan for their financial futures using personalised insights into their financial position. It also launched BMO Credit Coach in November 2025 to help customers understand, monitor and build their credit histories.
Meanwhile, on the rewards side, it has pushed further ahead. The 2023 purchase of LoyaltyOne’s AIR MILES programme was rebranded to Blue Rewards in 2026, and it has also become the only bank partner to Walmart in Canada.
Best personal investing platform: TD Securities
TD Securities wins this year’s award on the back of its Precious Metals Digital Store, which has established itself as a leading retail investment platform in Canada.
As the bank’s first enterprise-wide e-commerce offering, the platform has steadily expanded access to physical precious metals investing for both TD and non-TD clients. Its proposition is broad and inclusive, offering more than 200 products sourced from global mints, across a wide range of price points to support both first-time investors and experienced buyers. The platform’s integration of digital convenience with physical fulfilment – including home delivery, branch collection and secure vault storage – has materially widened participation in the asset class.
Performance over the review period has been particularly strong, supported by heightened retail demand for alternative investments. TD reported triple-digit increases in transaction volumes, alongside robust year-on-year growth across key metrics, including revenue, transactions and site visits.
A defining feature of the platform is its continued investment in functionality and user experience. Enhancements over the past year include a broad set of website improvements driven by client feedback, upgrades to underlying technology and the adoption of a more flexible architecture to improve performance and scalability. At the same time, TD has expanded its Secure Storage proposition, which has delivered rapid growth in assets and accounts while addressing client preferences for convenient and insured bullion ownership.
The result is a fully integrated, digitally led platform that balances product breadth and customer-centric design – positioning TD as a clear leader in Canada’s retail precious metals investment market.
Best bank for large corporates: RBC
Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) completed a transformational year in which it combined market leadership with exceptional execution of one of the most complex banking integrations ever attempted.
Already the country’s largest bank by market capitalisation and a leader across personal and commercial banking, RBC seized a rare growth opportunity in 2025 through its acquisition of HSBC Canada. The CAD13.5 billion ($9.5 billion) transaction – the largest financial services deal in Canada’s history – brought 800,000 clients into the franchise and significantly expanded the bank’s international capabilities.
What distinguishes RBC’s performance is not just the scale of the acquisition but the way it was delivered. The bank executed an unprecedented ‘close-and-convert‘ process, migrating the majority of clients, employees and data in a single weekend, despite not having access to HSBC’s underlying technology. Millions of documents and over 400 terabytes of data were transferred while maintaining uninterrupted client service.
Beyond integration, RBC used the opportunity to enhance its product suite. It launched new international payments capabilities supporting transactions in 200+ countries and 80 currencies, introduced virtual account management (unique in the Canadian market) and strengthened liquidity and working capital solutions. These developments were complemented by a new digital platform, RBC Edge, designed to simplify access to banking services and improve daily treasury management.
Financial performance has followed execution. The bank reported year-on-year growth in corporate banking revenue, loans and deposits, reinforcing its position as the leading partner for large corporates in Canada.
RBC’s ability to combine scale, innovation and flawless delivery during a once-in-a-generation integration sets it apart in this year’s awards.
