A combination of external and internal factors made RBC's HSBC deal a reality.Duane Cole/The Globe and Mail
He’ll never want to admit it, but Royal Bank of Canada RY-T chief executive Dave McKay can thank Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, at least in part, for landing Canada’s most coveted bank deal in decades.
Like many of his industry peers, Mr. McKay has been frustrated with Ottawa for slapping an additional, permanent tax on bank and life insurance company profits in the most recent federal budget, something Ottawa has attributed to clawing back some of the financial relief it provided during the COVID-19 pandemic.
While the federal government can taketh away, it can also provide, and seven months later, another pandemic financial policy has proven to be quite helpful to RBC – even if the assistance is unintended.
Because there was so much economic uncertainty when Canada entered its first COVID-19 lockdowns in March, 2020, the federal government and the country’s banking regulator wanted banks to preserve cash as a buffer against any shocks. To enforce this, they prevented the lenders from hiking their dividends, something they often did annually.
RBC deal for HSBC Canada faces high regulatory, political hurdles
There was no way to know it then, but Canada’s banks kept churning out profits, even through multiple lockdowns. That meant all the cash they would have normally put toward dividend hikes piled up on their balance sheets.
RBC wasn’t the only lender that saw its coffers swell, but because it is Canada’s largest bank by profit, it was able to hoard large amounts each quarter. Ultimately, that money was deployed to win the HSBC Canada auction, in the form of a $13.5-billion, all-cash bid.
At the same time, HSBC Canada’s parent, London-based HSBC Holdings PLC, must have seen all that money piling up. So, even though HSBC’s global management team had long said it was committed to Canada, if there was any time to sell, this was it. All that excess cash gave HSBC a greater chance of selling for top dollar – and, crucially, an exit before any potential recession.
The second element of RBC’s winning strategy, and arguably the most important, is an internal one, and it is rooted in something so often overlooked in business: discipline.
Ever since Mr. McKay acquired California-based City National Corp., which specializes in banking for high-net-worth clients, for US$5.4-billion in 2015, just five months into his tenure, there have been endless questions from investors and analysts about what RBC would do next. Often, they centred on growth in the United States.
Mr. McKay has been batting these away for years, suggesting RBC isn’t all that interested in establishing a large retail banking footprint in the U.S. Doing so requires scale, which means it would take one or two large deals to make an impact. To his mind, it just isn’t worth it, considering where RBC is starting from, and because retail banking isn’t as profitable in the U.S. as it is in Canada.
But the questions kept coming, especially as the Big Six banks started accumulated gobs of cash during the pandemic. Then two of RBC’s Canadian rivals, Toronto-Dominion Bank and Bank of Montreal, splurged on deals of their own. Late last year, BMO bought California-based Bank of the West for $17.1-billion, the largest U.S. deal in Canadian banking history, and early this year TD bought First Horizon for US$13.4-billion.
Standing pat is incredibly tough when rivals are writing big cheques. The fear of missing out is real, and investors tend to be myopic, too, so they have a habit of rewarding short-term revenue growth.
RBC, though, never wavered. “Patience is really important,” Mr. McKay said on a conference call with reporters Tuesday.
Royal Bank wasn’t necessarily waiting for this precise opportunity. “We didn’t know [the HSBC Canada sale] was going to happen, or the timing,” he said. But sometimes executives get lucky. And having all that excess capital allowed RBC to splurge on what Mr. McKay called a “more sure-footed transaction” relative to rivals’ deals.
He didn’t go into specifics, but based on its financials, Bank of the West is a fixer-upper for BMO. It is also based in a state where BMO has almost no footprint. First Horizon, meanwhile, may not have even been TD CEO’s first choice for its most recent U.S. retail banking deal, after TD was reported to be in the auction for Bank of the West just a few months prior. HSBC, by contrast, is a very profitable bank, with a 14-per-cent return on equity over the past 12 months, rather healthy by global standards.
What RBC will have to prove now is that it hasn’t overpaid. Just because it had the cash to burn doesn’t mean it needs to use it all.
The bank’s executives are stressing that after making some adjustments, it’s paying about nine times HSBC Canada’s forward earnings, which is below the long-term average trading multiple for Canadian lenders. However, bank deals are also priced off of a multiple of the target’s book value, and at 2.5 times HSBC Canada’s, RBC is paying a healthy premium.
That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In fact, during Mr. McKay’s tenure, it’s become a bit of a standard. When RBC bought City National, it paid 2.6 times book value, and at the time, almost everyone on Bay Street wondered if the bank overpaid. All those fears have subsided over the past seven years.
What’s become clear is that RBC is willing to pay up for quality. Some bankers chase cheap assets, and may get lucky and find a diamond in the rough. RBC, though, has tried that before, and it resulted in a disastrous acquisition of North Carolina-based Centura Banks Inc. in 2001. Unwinding the deal took a decade, and when RBC ultimately sold the division in 2012, it took a $1.5-billion charge in the process.
“We bought a franchise that had to be transformed and changed – it wasn’t the ‘Tier 1′ franchise,” Mr. McKay said about Centura in a 2015 interview with The Globe and Mail. “Our biggest [lesson] from that failed venture was that you have to buy the highest-quality franchise and build on it.” Sound familiar?
Tim Kiladze