Bloomberg Surveillance · Oct 20, 2026
With Dave McKay, President & CEO, Royal Bank of Canada
Royal Bank of Canada is now larger than Citigroup and Wells Fargo, and Dave McKay, its president and CEO, credits a model spread across Canada, the US, Europe and Asia rather than a bet on any one of them. Most banks caught in the AI build-out are buying capacity from someone else. Dave told Bloomberg Surveillance that RBC runs its own compute, storage and open-weight models instead, which he says is how the bank manages demand it cannot otherwise predict.
"We're not consuming a third-party Anthropic token in most cases. So we found a way to optimize our demand." — Dave McKay
Dave runs a bank with a balance sheet big enough that regulators and rivals both watch how much of it goes into AI infrastructure financing, and he says RBC is already pulling some of that exposure back off its own book.
The full segment is covered here so you can skip it.
Here are the 4 takeaways that matter.
Key Takeaways
RBC is now larger than Citi and Wells Fargo, which Dave credits to a diversified model across four regions
Canada-US trade friction over steel, autos and lumber has hit confidence, not prices — it's slowing Canadian home-buying
Canada is diversifying its energy exports with new pipelines, moving beyond the 4 million barrels a day it sends to the US
RBC runs its own compute and open-weight models rather than buying third-party AI tokens
RBC is "taking some risk off the book" on AI financing through strategic risk transfers
Cybersecurity costs have risen "substantially" as RBC defends against AI-sharpened attacks
1. Bigger Than Citi, Wells
Dave opened by sizing up the bank he runs. RBC's scale, in his telling, comes from being spread across several markets rather than concentrated in one.
RBC is now larger than Citigroup and Wells Fargo
"We're a scaled bank, top 10 in the world, with great growth ambitions here in the United States." — Dave McKay
He credits that size to a diversified model across Canada, the US, Europe and Asia, which he says gives RBC options that a bank built around a single home market does not have.
