JPMorgan Chase & Co. JPM-N has poached the head of Bank of Nova Scotia’s BNS-T innovation banking unit to head its effort to expand banking services to Canadian technology companies.
David Rozin will join the U.S. financial services giant this month in Toronto as head of its Canadian innovation economy unit after serving for nearly seven years as vice-president and head of technology and innovation banking at Scotiabank.
He was previously associate vice-president of technology with National Bank of Canada for a year and a half. Before that spent a decade with Royal Bank of Canada, including two years as national director, overseeing client growth strategies across retail and consumer services, technology, media and entertainment and health care. His hiring comes three years after the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank reordered the domestic sector.
Mr. Rozin’s “deep expertise and understanding of startups and venture capital, and long‑standing relationships across Canada’s innovation corridors, makes him well-positioned to help founders and investors scale with confidence,” said JPM Canada CEO David Rawlings in a statement.
JPM, the world’s most valuable bank by market capitalization, confirmed its planned expansion in Canadian tech banking last fall after making modest inroads here catering to the particular banking needs of innovation-driven companies, venture capital firms and founders. It has five dedicated tech bankers in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver and has picked up hundreds of clients in Canada, including legal software vendor Clio. The Vancouver-area company uses JP Morgan for cash management services and has a credit facility with the U.S. lender and fellow U.S. bank, Comerica Inc.
JPMorgan plots expansion into banking for Canadian tech firms
JPM decided to lean into Canadian tech after concluding it was doing well here but should bulk up to better serve one of the world’s top 10 innovation markets.
Its 10-year-old global innovation banking group is co-led by New York-based Andrew Kresse and John China, a former president with Silicon Valley Bank, who is in the San Francisco area. The unit has more than 11,000 clients in 40 markets, with 550 employees.
JPM has operated in Canada for more than a century. Its Morgan Bank of Canada was the first foreign bank established here in 1981 and Chase Manhattan Canada received a charter as a Canadian bank a year later. JPM has 600-plus employees in Canada in five business lines, including investment banking, commercial banking, payments and asset management.
JPM is expanding into a crowded space: Canadian banks began catering in a more focused way to the particular demands of technology clients in the late 2010s.
Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce bought technology financier Wellington Financial in 2018, making it the cornerstone of its innovation banking group. Bank of Montreal and Scotiabank launched technology and innovation banking groups in 2019, the same year National Bank started expanding its long-established practice nationally.
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Then in 2020, Royal Bank of Canada hired former OMERS Ventures managing partner Sid Paquette to consolidate and expand its technology-focused banking practice under the brand RBCx, establishing Canada’s largest bank as the biggest domestic player in the sector.
The Canadian banks benefited after U.S.-based Silicon Valley Bank, an early specialty technology financier, collapsed. Several raided SVB’s Canadian ranks, including Toronto-Dominion Bank, which became the last of the Big Five to enter the space in 2023, while National bought SVB’s Canadian loan portfolio.
Mr. Kresse told The Globe last fall that JPM’s goal is to “complement the local banks” by pitching itself as the bank of choice for Canadian tech companies as they expand globally, particularly those requiring more lucrative services including advising on mergers and acquisitions, raising large private financings or going public.
JPM’s strategy here is to offer a full range of banking services, including deposit-taking (which it can do as a Schedule II bank), cash management, asset management, credit lines and private banking, plus more specialized offerings catering to the sector including offering venture debt. JPM’s goal is to double its innovation banking business and employee count in Canada to start.
Scotiabank is two-plus years into a turnaround plan focused on building its deposit base in Canada and reallocating resources from its Latin American operations to its North American divisions. Technology and media accounted for 2.5 per cent of its total business and government loans portfolio. Last week Scotiabank posted higher first-quarter profit, beating analysts’ expectations.
With files from Stefanie Marotta