Scotia Capital

Scotia Capital Inc is the investment banking arm of the Bank of Nova Scotia, often called Scotiabank. Scotia Capital concentrates in different areas. This is largely because in the 1990s it grew by acquisition. Through Scotia Waterous it is a world leader in mergers and acquisitions in the oil and gas industry, but it has will not operate outside this niche. It has a strong metals trading division called Scotia Mocatta.

The Bank of Nova Scotia started as a merchant bank in 1832 to help the cross Atlantic trade. It soon developed a strong retail banking network both within Canada and also in the mid west of and East Coast of the United States. Corporate banking services were offered from the 1980s from their New York office, and over the years the offering gradually grew from office to office. The Bank of Nova Scotia which by that time had become a successful retail bank by an aggressive process of expansion and acquisition which saw it take over such banks as the Bank of Ottawa, the Montreal Trust and the Bank of New Brunswick.

As a Canadian bank the Bank of Nova Scotia had a unique advantage in that it was able to expand both to the United States to the south and to the British Empire of which Canada was a proud member. This meant that it was able to open offices in Jamaica and much of the rest of the Caribbean (today it is the leading provider of financial services in the Caribbean) and it has a strong international presence from this period, which have been leveraged to grow Scotia Capital.

Scotiabank has twelve and a half million customers and 69,000 employees. It has 2,000 branches throughout in fifty countries. Scotia Bank started providing corporate banking services to clients from its New York offices in the early 1980s. This grew over time so that by 1983 this was offered on an office by office basis in many large American and Canadian cities and it became a more general offering. To expand the investment offering, the Bank of Nova Scotia acquired McLeod Young Weir. This was a stock broking firm based in Toronto that had been founded in 1921, and was a leading broking firm in Canada. The name was later changed to ScotiaMcleod Inc. (also known as Scotia McLeod Inc.) to signify its new owners. In 1995 Scotia McLeod was formerly integrated into the Bank of Nova Scotia’s capital markets business. The new division was named Scotia Capital Markets. In 1999 there was a further internal merger when Scotia Capital Markets was merged with Scotia Corporate Banking to become Scotia Capital.

As part of this growth the Bank of Nova Scotia acquired the established metal bullion dealer the Mocatta Group. This is now known as Scotia Mocatta.

The Bank of Nova Scotia acquired the boutique investment house of Waterous & Co., which specializes in mergers and acquisitions in the oil and gas industry. This is where Scotia Capital’s expertise in this niche area has come from. Scotia Capital also has a large presence in Mexico due to its acquisition of Grupo Financiero Inverlat S.A. in 2000.