Laurent Ferreira: 'My focus is on Canada, Canadian clients, the Canadian economy'
It was a special year for Montreal-based National Bank of Canada, given that the country’s sixth-largest lender beat analysts’ expectations every quarter in this fiscal year, topped its all-time share price high and dominated headlines with its bid to take over Edmonton-based Canadian Western Bank (CWB).
As of the second week of December, National had the second-best year-to-date share price increase among the Big Six lenders, behind only Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce.
National Bank chief executive Laurent Ferreira spoke to the Financial Post about what the bank did right in 2024, its goals for next year and how he expects the economy to behave in 2025.
Laurent Ferreira: I think the most important thing is we stuck to the plan. We have in place a strategy that we believe is resilient, that performs really well through cycles and that has been focused on areas of expertise and strength that we have across the bank, and we’ve been very disciplined in that execution overall. But we didn’t do anything differently. Over the years, we’ve been very consistent in that message. We believe in the areas where we should be allocating capital investing longer term, and we stuck to that. So, no, nothing different.
LF: I was referring to the economy in general. We’ve seen a slowdown overall in the second half of 2024. We expect that to continue in the first half of 2025. We are still in an environment where rates are restrictive. You still have monetary policy that is evolving, but rates are still high. We are starting to feel the effects throughout our various portfolios of what higher rates have done to the Canadian economy, whether it’s consumers, their consumption behaviour has shifted their impact on housing as well and
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