Ray Chun, Toronto-Dominion Bank’s new chief executive officer, will move into the role effective Nov. 1 and take over from outgoing CEO Bharat Masrani at TD’s next annual general meeting in the spring.Galit Rodan/The Globe and Mail
Raymond Chun’s rise through the ranks of Toronto-Dominion Bank TD-T has been so rapid that many Bay Street watchers might have missed his ascent.
It has been barely three years since Mr. Chun first joined TD’s top executive team in 2021, when he became head of wealth and insurance. He was made head of Canadian personal banking two years later in December, 2023, and was in that job for less than one year before Thursday, when chief executive officer Bharat Masrani named Mr. Chun as his successor.
Bay Street had been expecting Mr. Masrani to step aside for months in response to anti-money-laundering failures that the lender is anticipating will result in more than US$3-billion in fines from U.S. regulators. But few were expecting Mr. Chun – who is known for his direct, no-nonsense management style – to take his place.
“While the market will NOT be surprised by Bharat’s departure, it WILL be surprised by who has been chosen as his replacement,” Bank of Nova Scotia analyst Meny Grauman said in a note to clients published Thursday morning.
“Mr. Chun is a seasoned executive, and not directly tied to any of TD’s issues in the U.S., but he does have a relatively low profile on the Street, and is certainly not the ‘outsider’ candidate that most investors had expected.”
National Bank Financial analyst Gabriel Dechaine said in his own Thursday morning note to clients that “some investors were open to the possibility of TD selecting an external CEO candidate, one with deep U.S. banking sector experience (and experience with U.S. regulators) given the bank’s AML issues.”
Mr. Chun was born in South Korea and moved to Canada when he was four years old. He and his wife Karen live in Oakville, Ont., and have two grown children, a son and a daughter, both in university. He did his undergraduate studies at Western University before getting a master’s in business administration from Queen’s University.
While his appointment to TD’s top job has clearly taken some by surprise, it represents the culmination of a goal Mr. Chun has pursued since shortly after joining TD’s management training program in 1992.
“Early in my career I did set career aspirations that I did want to be an executive of the organization,” Mr. Chun told the Korean Canadian Scholarship Foundation in 2016. “Those are conscious choices that you make and I made those, I’d say, probably about three or four years in.”
“I am an introvert by nature, so I had to learn over time how to give speeches, how to get comfortable in front of large crowds, it is not a natural thing for me,” he said.
In a conference call with analysts on Thursday morning, Mr. Masrani said Mr. Chun was selected “after a lengthy and competitive process” that considered both “the internal and external market available.”
Given TD’s continuing anti-money-laundering issues in the U.S. and the fact that most of Mr. Chun’s experience is related to TD’s Canadian business, Bank of Montreal analyst Sohrab Movahedi posed a blunt question on the call: “I’m just trying to understand, have you had to deal with problems before?”
In response, Mr. Chun said “when you’re running these large complex businesses that I’ve run, running into complexity and dealing with regulators and mapping out complex strategies as we move forward has all been sort of in my experience.”
Just days before his appointment was announced, Mr. Chun briefly reflected on the recent acceleration of his career during a Barclays conference in New York.
“It is amazing,” he said at the Sept 10 event after being told his one-year anniversary as head of Canadian personal banking was approaching. “The time does fly.”