The retrenchment of Laurentian Bank of Canada, to operating only in Quebec, changed the landscape for the 2004 Account Managers’ Report Card.
The absence of Laurentian means we had fewer respondents this year. Researchers Heather Buchansky, Aileen Corr, Kate Betts-Wilmott and Rachel Betts-Wilmott conducted telephone interviews with 168 account managers at Canada’s six largest banks, and at individual credit unions from across the country, during May and June.
They spoke to an average of 24 respondents from each bank, chosen at random from Investment Executive‘s mailing list. The account managers were asked to rate their bank’s performance in 24 categories. We also spoke to 27 account managers at various credit unions across the country, to get a general feel for the difference in culture between credit union advisors and bankers.
The results are displayed in the table on page 19.
We added four new categories to the Report Card this year, including compensation and ease of moving firms. Unsurprising, the average rating for the latter category is much lower, at 4.9, than for brokers and planners.
As bank employees or credit union members, account managers can’t take their assets with them when they switch firms.
To score the Report Card, we averaged the individual ratings in each category and produced each firm’s overall score for that question. To create the IE rating, we averaged each firm’s score for each category and awarded extra marks for the number of times a firm took the top spot in a category. The IE rating determines the firm’s ranking, from highest to lowest.
Despite all this tinkering, Bank of Nova Scotia retained its top ranking for the second year in a row, with Royal Bank of Canada closely following. The biggest jump in the rankings in 2004 was by Canada’s credit unions.
We were a bit surprised by this year’s results. For all the unsettling talk about bank mergers, account managers at Canadian banks are remarkably sanguine about their working conditions in 2004.
Although the respondents said mergers would probably have significant impact on their firm, there is little in this year’s Report Card that indicates a greater unhappiness among bankers as a result of merger uncertainties. Marks for most of the 24 categories moved in a narrow range.