Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce Barclays 24th Annual Global Financial Services Conference

Great to be here. Thanks for having us.

Yeah, it's interesting. The way you asked the question, it could almost be talking about the macro or it could be talking about our performance and the banking performance generally. I would say it's actually a good way to ask the question because it's tough to have a resilient economy without a strong financial system. It's tough to have a strong financial system without a resilient economy. We're feeding off of each other a little bit. Starting with the macro picture, just generally, we've been in the trade spin cycle for the better part of two years now. But really, the effect of tariff rate hasn't changed meaningfully from where it was previously. You've seen generally that resilience on display in terms of the underlying enduring economic strength of Canada. Not everything is about exports, not everything is about trade.

You've seen relatively stable performance. The unemployment rate has hovered between 6.5% and 7%, and the economic picture has been generally stable with some optimism on the horizon, I think, also helping to sustain it. When you turn to our performance as a banking sector, part of it is just the execution of the strategy. It's the compounding effect of deepening relationships and getting better and staying closer to what it is that we do. It's clearly been a constructive capital markets environment, which has also helped the wealth management business. When we look at our credit books, it's been resilient, is a good way to describe it. We've seen a bit of a drift higher in delinquency, a bit of a drift higher in loss rates, but nothing that is concerning, nothing that is systematic.

We expect more of the same as we look forward, both from an economic perspective and from an underlying performance perspective. Things are reasonably stable with that positive outlook on the horizon.

Yeah, thanks. We've been talking about our strategy in this manner now for a number of years, and we've been making the right investments in the right technology, the right people, and just pursuing that strategy consistently in each of our business units. When we think about that first one, mass affluent and just the private market, the private banking side, we've invested in tools like a digital CIBC GoalPlanner, invested in an ECRM that's allowed the client experience to really improve, and you're seeing it in our customer satisfaction scores. As we have those deeper conversations with clients, we're seeing the results of that bear out in the results. So double-digit growth in funds under management. We're acquiring clients and growing the mass affluent franchise at a nice clip on a year-over-year basis, and the results are showing through.

We think there's a lot more still to do, even within just our own customer base, let alone customer acquisition and growing outside of our own customer base. We think just mining our own customer base for more of that opportunity is very much in front of us. We continue to make the investments and are quite pleased with the progress on that one. When you think about the digital side, it's very complementary to that mass affluent, right? There's not customers that are strictly one or the other, but even there we've got our Simplii Financial where we are engaging in re-platforming the solution to provide our clients with a different channel that's still within our ecosystem. Investor's Edge, as an example, it's our direct brokerage. We have re-platformed it. We're seeing very strong growth in client acquisition, very strong growth in AUA, safely double digits in terms of asset growth in that business, and it's really been powering the performance of the wealth franchise and the personal and business bank.

On the connectivity side, we talk about connectivity because it's such an important part of our commercial and corporate franchise that these businesses do interact and the face of the client should be one face. If you're a commercial client, you are seeing cooperation with the capital markets business on interest rate structuring, on FX structuring, on capital market solutions generally being brought in to the commercial clients. The depth of relationship is strong. About 95% of our commercial clients have a deposit relationship with us.

Roughly a third of them have a wealth management relationship with us, and that number on the wealth management side isn't growing as rapidly because we're still acquiring clients. We do continue to deepen those relationships, and so it's performing quite well as well, and happy with the progress. You're seeing high single digit to low double digit growth in assets balance on both sides of the balance sheet. The businesses on commercial banking on both sides of the border and in capital markets are performing quite well. That final pillar when it comes to enable, simplify and protect, it's a very big and important pillar for us. It's about making sure everything from defense when it comes to cyber and AML, we're investing at pace.

It's also where we're deploying some of our AI solutions, whether it's CIBC AdvisorAssist, which is really helping the frontline advice, whether it's on our CIBC AI, which we've rolled out the first agentic AI solution in Canadian banking to a broad network internally to be able to just change the way we work and change the productivity of how we work. There's a lot going on there. All of that strategy, and it's just kind of a quick flyby on the strategy. It's been what's driving compounding double-digit EPS growth, compounding increases in ROE. We've had a strong increase in profitability, a strong increase in earnings per share. What gives us the confidence that a lot of that performance is sustainable and repeatable is the fact that it's on strategy, and we're delivering on what we've been talking about for quite some time.

Yeah. For starters, that flyby I just did on the strategy needs a deeper dive. I will give you a data point here, a data point there, but we do owe the market a set of KPIs to better understand the strategy, to really be able to go deeper. We will spend much more time on each of our pillars. We have to refresh the pillars a little bit. The way I described it just now, it sounds like there is a strategy for our retail bank, a strategy for our wholesale bank, and you just kind of combine them into an overall strategy. It is kind of the reverse. There is an enterprise strategy that looks at making sure we are deepening relationships, making sure that we are using innovation and technology, and making sure that we are optimizing the expense base and optimizing the businesses that are a little bit more commoditized.