Dave McKay belongs to the rare breed of bank CEO with a techie background. He joined the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) in 1988 as a computer programmer, while obtaining a mathematics and computer science degree at the University of Waterloo.
But while many of his non-techie peers are hailing the era of ‘banks as technology companies’, Mr McKay disagrees. “If a bank thinks it is a tech company, then it is wrong. We are still business-to-consumer and business-to-business companies, trying to meet customer needs. Banks are using technology to anticipate those needs and meet them in a creative way, but we don’t derive our income from technology,” he says.
