From recovering unpaid debt to saving thousands of workdays, Canada’s biggest banks are racing to use artificial intelligence to improve their financial performance, say their chief executives .
Toronto-Dominion Bank chief executive Raymond Chun told investors last year that the lender aims to generate $1 billion in annual value from AI by 2028, but he said on Wednesday that he may have underestimated the technology’s potential.
“What I am seeing with agentic AI capabilities is something that I have not seen with automation, I have not seen in digital,” he said at the Scotiabank Financials Summit. “You can finally truly go end to end and reimagine the entire process. We do think there is a sizeable upside to the $1-billion (level).”
For example, Chun said TD has reduced its preliminary review of mortgage applications to an average of three minutes using an AI agent from 15 hours previously. By the end of this quarter, the same AI agent is expected to significantly reduce the costs associated with funding and discharging mortgages.
“That agentic capability … is transferable now to small business banking (and) auto finance,” he said. “Once you build this capability, you can actually move it and that’s where I think I underestimated the benefits.”
Chun also said TD recently launched its first AI agent to assist with collections, the process of working with customers who have fallen behind on loan payments. In those situations, the biggest challenge is reaching the customer, he said, and TD’s AI agents have increased the “connect rate” to between 20 per cent and 25 per cent from seven per cent.
Royal Bank of Canada chief executive Dave McKay said the lender sees significant opportunity in using AI to transform its business instead of pursuing transformational acquisitions that would require it to use its shares.
“That is going to drive by far the greatest shareholder return and that’s where the focus of the organization is right now,” he said at the conference. “It is fundamental, and it has a huge opportunity to drive those ROEs (return on equity) higher, to drive a significantly higher growth rate. Making an acquisition would distract us right now.”
National Bank of Canada chief executive Laurent Ferreira said AI has helped reduce the bank’s call centre volume by 43 per cent over the past year and enabled wealth advisers and capital markets professionals to access information and analysis at “crazy speeds.”
But he said he would never allow AI to advise clients on major decisions without human oversight, nor permit the technology to allocate capital or make pricing decisions.
“You can’t ignore it. You can’t go crazy with it either,” he said at the conference. “You are never going to hear me say AI is a strategy. AI is a competitive advantage. Everyone has it, but how do you use it?”
Bank of Nova Scotia chief executive Scott Thomson said AI has helped the lender save about 24,000 workdays over the past quarter and a half.
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Banks say AI is allowing them to recover unpaid loans, cut call centre volumes and save workdays
2026-09-09 21:01:06
