Search

Over the last 30 years, the business mix of banks in Canada has changed significantly. Progress in information-processing technology, legislative changes, and market forces have combined to blur the traditional distinctions between banks and other financial institutions and have allowed banks to offer a much wider range of products and services. In this article, the author reviews the expansion of bank lending to households over this period and their recent movement into personal wealth management. While these trends were facilitated by revisions to legislation, they also reflected the changing needs of the "baby boom" generation, first as home-buyers and, more recently, as middle-aged investors. On the commercial and corporate side, banks reacted to the rapid expansion of securities markets (and to the reduced demand for intermediation by both lenders/depositors and borrowers) by moving into investment banking, after legislative changes opened this business to them in the late 1980s. They also used their expertise in credit assessment and risk management to provide credit guarantees and to act as counterparties and intermediaries in derivatives markets. Notable in this broadening of bank activities has been their more recent entry into the trust, mutual fund, and retail brokerage business. The banks have also made preliminary forays into insurance. The expansion of off-balance-sheet activities has made fee income an increasingly important part of bank earnings. The article also looks at the emerging tools and techniques that will most likely transform the structure of banking in the future.

The role of cash in Canadians’ lives has been evolving, as innovations in digital payments have become more widely adopted over the past decade. We contribute to the Bank of Canada’s research on central bank digital currency by monitoring Canadians’ use of cash and their adoption of digital payment methods.

The financial turbulence over the past year has been costly and difficult for many individuals and financial institutions; it's been challenging for policy-makers; and it's had implications for the overall economy.

On 5 May 2015, the Bank of Canada published a consultation document entitled “Bank of Canada Emergency Lending Policies.” The consultation period ended on 4 July 2015. This page summarizes the comments received and the Bank of Canada’s responses to those comments.

The Board of Directors of the Bank of Canada announced today that, pursuant to Section 6 of the Bank of Canada Act, Malcolm Knight has been appointed Senior Deputy Governor of the Bank for a seven-year term, effective 5 July 1999.

In 2015, the Bank of Canada undertook the large-scale Retailer Survey on the Cost of Payment Methods.

This article summarizes the proceedings of a conference hosted by the Bank of Canada in May 1997. The first conference held by the Bank on this subject was in 1993, two years after the introduction of inflation targeting in Canada. The 1997 conference revisited many of the analytic issues related to price stability that had been examined at the first conference, while also considering several additional questions. This time, with the extension of inflation-control targets beyond 1998 under consideration, particular emphasis was placed on the role and design of those targets. The conference also featured a round-table discussion among practitioners of monetary policy in three inflation-targeting countries—New Zealand, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. Their remarks, which focussed on the experience with inflation targets, bring out very clearly the common challenges facing monetary policymakers in open economies.

We assess the impact of COVID-19 on consumption indicators by estimating the effects of government-mandated containment measures and of the willingness of individuals to voluntarily physically distance to prevent contagion.

This is the first of the Financial Markets Department’s descriptions of Canadian financial industrial organization. The document discusses the organization of the repurchase-agreement (repo) market in Canada.

Senior Deputy Governor Carolyn A. Wilkins discusses the challenges the Bank of Canada is facing as it seeks to renew its inflation-control target in 2021. Kicking off a day-long workshop on the renewal of the monetary policy framework, she explains how the Bank’s research on alternative frameworks is shaping up and invites discussion of how the COVID-19 crisis has changed what is known about alternative policy tools in action.