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Toronto-Dominion Bank (TD) has filed a shelf registration that will allow it to raise up to $15 billion through the sale of senior debt securities.
May 31 -
As it expands its U.S. branches, Toronto-Dominion is hoping to sell more products to existing customers and to emulate its cross-selling success in its home country of Canada.
April 27 -
TD is investing in a massive brick-and-mortar expansion even as its U.S. competitors increasingly question the future of the traditional storefront.
April 5
Across a footprint that stretches from Maine to Florida, TD Bank is almost annoyingly good at the small things customers love.
It offers dog treats to its branch patrons' four-legged companions. It makes sure its giveaway pens have no metal pocket clips (women don't like them; they cause too many snags). TD also has a flair for
Indeed, TD prides itself on the attention it pays to every detail in its interactions with the public.
What's less obvious is how well the U.S. retail banking unit of Canada's TD Bank Group (TD) has paid attention to the big details.
With smart calls on the macroeconomic and competitive environments, TD has grown in ways that suggest its strategy is built on something far more substantial than dog treats and dance routines. And with a conviction about the future of retail banking that veers from the more cautious path of its peers, TD-which now has more branches in the United States than in Canada-is doubling down on its investment in branches here, while many of its rivals are openly questioning the profitability of retail banking. JPMorgan Chase (JPM), for example, predicts that 70% of customers with less than $100,000 in deposits and investments will be unprofitable as a result of new regulations on bank fees.
If the U.S. retail customer makes for a business with thinning margins, count TD among the banks planning to make it up on volume. While the average bank branch conducts 11,000 transactions per month, the average TD branch conducts 17,500. And the company, which first entered the U.S. in 2004, sees ample room for its young U.S. franchise to grab market share.
This spring, at its annual shareholders meeting,
It will take years to fully evaluate whether TD has made the right call. But Bharat Masrani, the president and CEO of the U.S.-based TD Bank, does not see the bet on New York as being overly gutsy.
"It's not a small investment," he acknowledges. "But investments make sense if you are getting a decent return and it's providing you with a strategic advantage."
TD already enjoys both of those things in New York, where the bank and its legacy institutions went from having zero presence in 2001 to a strong franchise with close to 90 locations today.
Growing in Boston may be a tougher goal to achieve given the lack of available locations there, but TD has to continue to scout around if it is to keep on leveraging its presence in Massachusetts, where it currently has about 150 locations.
The bank also has aggressive growth plans in mind for South Florida, despite its being an epicenter of the mortgage meltdown. "The asset side of the balance sheet is challenging there, but there is nothing wrong with the deposit side in Florida," says Masrani. "This is the fifth largest state in the union. … It's very attractive to us." Two years ago, TD had about 35 branches in Florida. Now it has 167.
The unwavering commitment to retail banking that TD has displayed since the start of the crisis has benefitted customers who say they could not get credit anywhere else. Among them: a franchisee of Kiddie Academy, which has a chain of 101 daycare centers in 22 states. The franchisee, which received pre-approval for a Small Business Administration loan, got turned down by two other institutions before obtaining a loan through TD.
"The banks all got kind of tight with their credit," says Lene Steelman, Kiddie Academy's controller and vice president of accounting. "Since we were getting 'no's,' we expected the same thing from [TD] also."
TD is a contrarian in part because it can afford to be. Its return on common equity is 18%, well above the 10% level of many big regional banks. And it reports a 50% increase in loan volume, excluding the impact of acquisitions, over the four years ended Dec. 31, compared with a 1% drop in loan volume overall for banks with more than $10 billion of assets.
When other banks hesitated, "TD hit the gas pedal," says Brian Klock, an analyst with Keefe, Bruyette & Woods. "They were making loans when other banks didn't want to."
Here again, Masrani argues that TD was just taking a logical step, not a haphazard one. "We didn't have the problems like the others. So why would we not be open for business?"
Key to TD's ability to come through the crisis in relatively strong shape is the bank's Canadian parentage. The subprime mortgage market was practically nonexistent in Canada, and the TD Bank Group's conservative profile prompted it to exit the structured products business three years ahead of the 2008 crash.
"At that time, the analysts and a lot of people vilified us and said, 'What were you guys thinking? This is the new holy grail of banking,'" recalls Masrani, who also is head of U.S. personal and commercial banking for TD Bank Group. "We exited because …it was not obvious that it fit our risk appetite."
That's not to say, however, that neither TD nor its parent company is risk averse. Frustrated by the limited growth opportunities in its home country, TD Bank Group is one of several Canadian companies to have scouted for returns elsewhere.
Toronto-based
Of course, not all the Canadian forays south fared well. Royal Bank of Canada (RY), which acquired Centura Banks for $2.3 billion in 2001, suffered from a lack of scale and good execution. RBC finally threw in the towel last year, selling its Raleigh, N.C.-based
TD Bank Group took perhaps the biggest gamble
TD Bank Group's successful U.S. expansion efforts predate the Chrysler deal, of course. Under CEO Ed Clark, the Toronto-based company transformed itself from a sleepy, Canadian retail bank operation into one of the top financial services firms in North America. Among U.S. banks, its TD Bank unit now ranks as the 10th largest, with $188.9 billion of assets at Dec. 31.
Clark, who declined to be interviewed for this story, pressed for growth in the United States even though it caused him grief from critics in Canada who accused him of neglecting customers there, says Tom Velk, an American economist who chairs the North American Studies program at McGill University in Montreal. "You have to give him credit for being a mold-breaker," he says.
The company
Masrani now oversees a U.S. business headquartered in both Portland and in Cherry Hill, N.J., where Vernon Hill, a fast-food franchisee who would become a banking icon, started Commerce.
The events leading up to TD's takeover of Commerce were tumultuous.
TD saw potential in the empire Hill had built. Hill had envisioned bank branches as retail stores centered on customer service. Up in Canada, Clark had been molding his company along similar lines. "TD was probably closer to Commerce than most banks would be with their retail focus," says Barclays Capital analyst John Aiken.
Since acquiring Commerce, TD has bolstered its mortgage and credit-card businesses and added 162 branches in key markets along the Eastern seaboard. It also has expanded its relationships with customers, though it still sees plenty of room for improvement. Its customers have an average of 4.5 TD products per household. Customers of a champion cross-seller like Wells Fargo have closer to six products per household.
TD won't have to worry much about looking outside its footprint for growth, even if it already is No. 2 in a big market like Philadelphia, where it has 11% deposit market share.
"There are other markets where we have lots of room to grow," Masrani says. In deposits, TD has only just crossed the 5% mark in New York City. It has just a 4.4% share of the Boston metro area, and 2% of the Miami-Fort Lauderdale market.
"We can open a lot more stores and do a lot more business within the footprint for many years to come," Masrani says.
Since Commerce, TD has done a handful of small acquisitions,
"I am not staying up nights looking for a transformative acquisition. Frankly, [with] the economy, there is still fragility there. There is not enough certainty."
That leaves a fair amount of organic growth to fulfill TD's ambitious retail branching plans. Masrani promises the bank will be very particular about where and when it expands, adding that the company can't continually open branches to increase sales at the expense of long-term profitability.
"If we were just doing that game, at some point my bottom line would disappear because opening a new store is not an inexpensive hobby," Masrani says. "It takes a few years before it starts to pay for itself."
