Finance committee  I'd just like to say that I agree with everything Mr. Buell said. He has articulated it extremely well, and I don't think there is much more I can add. It is a great idea to have this inquiry, but the media needs to stay on top of this. The media needs to keep naming names the wa

Finance committee  It is absolutely profit before anyone else. It certainly has nothing to do with servicing the clients, as far as I could tell from the decades that I spent with Scotiabank. I also think this name and shame is starting to happen, because I don't think any of us would be sitting in

Finance committee  I'm not familiar with the FCAC broad review, so I can't comment on that, but I can comment on the financial literacy part. I think there are so many products being offered by the banks now that it's virtually impossible to educate the public on all of the different products, es

Finance committee  Well, it doesn't happen to me. I've been a bank customer for 41 years. I have not had any information from the bank regarding any of my products. Now, some of them, being flagged as “staff”, don't incur service charges: I did officially retire from the bank, so I don't pay that m

Finance committee  By the financial literacy component, do you mean getting the public to understand all the ins and outs of all their financial products?

Finance committee  Well, I guess the only way for a person to really be well informed is to do everything through a financial adviser. They have to go into the branch, make an appointment, and sit down with that person in order to get all the information they need to make an informed decision. At

Finance committee  It would be the CEO, without a doubt. It would be the CEO.

Finance committee  Recently—

Finance committee  Recently, I went into my own bank profile and found there was a Mastercard on my profile. I didn't have a Mastercard and I never applied for a Mastercard. I didn't know anything about Mastercard. I had a staff Visa. I contacted the bank and asked why I had this Mastercard. They s

Finance committee  All right. The only codes of conduct that I recall—and I've put this in my talking points—while I was working at Scotiabank, where I worked for 33 years, is there was, one, a code of conduct pertaining to customer confidentiality. There was absolute adherence to that and if you

Finance committee  Personally, I did not achieve my sales goals. I didn't even try to. As I said, I did this one trick where I recoded a bunch of accounts to be seniors accounts after going through everybody's profiles and figuring out how old they were so that I could do that. I left the branch

Finance committee  They pretty much do force a sale on their clients. In my branch in particular, which is very close to a university, they sold hundreds of credit cards to graduate students. Graduate students shouldn't have credit cards. Most graduate students will tell you that. They gave them h

Finance committee  Today it is far worse than it was back then.

Finance committee  It is far, far worse than it was back then. We have a little street festival in my hometown of Dundas. I was at the street festival on Saturday. I happened to meet an old banking colleague. She worked in the bank when I first started, in the same branch, and she still works for

Finance committee  The targets are set down by head office, I think, and all based on ROE, return on equity. They want to make a certain return on equity each year. That's how the banks state their profit margin. It's about the value of their stocks and keeping the stockholders happy. It's all base