Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Honourable members, thank you for this opportunity to speak with you today. The main focus of my comments will be ABM convenience fees within the specific context of Quebec.
While National Bank is Quebec's leading bank, we have a more limited reach elsewhere in Canada, where we operate 105 branches and as many ABMs. As we are concerned with providing our clients outside Quebec with the best possible service, the bank has become a member of the Exchange network.
I wish to point out that we did not join the network as a way to offer our clients the possibility of withdrawing funds without paying convenience fees. That was not our goal. We did it mainly to enable them to make deposits or transfer funds between accounts, which is what makes the Exchange network ABMs a remote service counter in the real sense of the term.
I also want to remind you that 46% of ABMs that are accessible through the Exchange network belong to banks. As such, this network cannot be regarded as belonging to cooperatives, especially given that Desjardins, the largest cooperative in the country, is not a member.
Our core market, Quebec, has some particular features that I would like to hone in on. Of the ABMs located in the province, 53% are operated by independent suppliers that frequently charge a convenience fee of $3 per transaction.
In addition, more than half of the ABMs operated by financial institutions belong to a deposit-taking institution that is not a bank and therefore not regulated by the federal government. That financial institution, the Desjardins Group, charges a convenience fee of $2 per transaction.
That means that the National Bank's convenience fee is lower than those charged at around 75% of ABMs in Quebec. It also means that our clients have to pay a $2-dollar convenience fee each time they use a Desjardins ABM, while Desjardins clients pay 50¢ less per transaction to use our ABMs.
In such an environment, we feel that imposing regulatory limits on such fees would be highly discriminatory and unfair for our clients. How could we explain to them that they have to pay $2 each time they use the ABMs of a competitor that operates four times as many banking machines and whose clients can, unlike them, withdraw cash from our machines or those of another chartered bank for free?
Moreover, our clients have dramatically altered their financial payment habits over the past 20 years, and they have benefited from a payment system that has continually evolved towards greater efficiency and reliability. The system is built on the user-pays principle, the only one that enables the deployment of new technologies and encourages economically rational choices. The arrival of the digital wallet will mark yet another step in that evolution and could very well make the topic of today's meeting irrelevant. One of the results of this adjustment process is that third-party use of our ABMs has declined 20% in the last few years.
However, since we only operate a handful of ABMs outside Quebec and only 6% of all ABMs located in Quebec, we are constantly analyzing market developments and client needs so we can offer our clients, through highly attractive banking packages, ready access to the various transaction methods at a competitive price, be it through banking machines or other means.
I'll be available for questions, in both languages.