Scotiabank is packing up its New York capital-markets office and heading uptown to Fifth Avenue. The new Midtown location, which Machen characterizes as the firm's new global headquarters in New York, is slated to open next fall. The location puts bankers closer to where clients and capital are clustered and makes life easier for commuters near Grand Central Terminal and Penn Station. As Machen put it, when you say Midtown, recruiting gets easier.
In May 2024, Machen became the chief executive of Scotiabank's global banking and markets division, following a lengthy career covering financial institutions and earlier roles at Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase & Co. Born in Texas, he arrived just as the bank was under six months into a strategy overhaul to pare back far-flung operations and to channel fresh investment to Canada, the US and Mexico.
Inside the capital-markets unit, he scaled back in Asia and said he de-emphasized areas such as biotechnology, pointing the business toward cross-border heavyweights that track Canada's traditional strengths: infrastructure, mining, energy, power and utilities. His view on the US is straightforward. He says the bank had underinvested there, and because the US is about 10 times larger than Canada and the annual fee pool is, by his estimate, $70 billion to $80 billion, the runway to grow is significant. As he put it, if you bring strong ideas, people and products, you can win.
US staffing is up 19% over the past two years while headcount in Canada has been flat, and since Machen took the reins the firm has brought on 50 managing directors and advanced over 30 employees from within. He said the team is intentionally patient on hiring, prioritizing cultural fit rather than chasing targets. His network is showing up in the org chart too. Alton McDowell departed JPMorgan to run global corporate banking, and Richard Tory, who led Morgan Stanley's Canadian investment-banking franchise as president, now heads Scotiabank's global mining group.
In fiscal 2025, capital-markets net income increased by around 30%, supported by better trading conditions and a pick-up in deal activity. In the most recent quarter, the division earned C$647 million, or $462 million, almost 37% higher than a year earlier. Analyst David Konrad at Keefe Bruyette & Woods wrote last month that while some normalization in capital-markets revenue is expected, heavy investment over roughly three years should lift the floor on those revenues. The stock is up almost 30% this year, ahead of the 27% rise in the S&P/TSX Canadian bank index.
Scotiabank has been turning long-cultivated relationships into mandates. In recent months it served as joint lead bookrunner on Canadian-dollar bonds for Amazon.com Inc. and Alphabet Inc. It also co-led Apotex Health Corp.'s C$1.3 billion IPO, the biggest Canadian healthcare listing on record. Machen says Canada is attracting more capital following a recent investor gathering headed by Prime Minister Mark Carney.
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Initially, the bank put more resources into Canada to reinforce its home base, but its US footprint has been growing consistently, with third-quarter results reaching a record, and that expansion now includes the new Midtown headquarters.
During the past two years, Scotiabank set up a Dallas regional center that is slated to employ more than 1,000 people, and it is increasing its emphasis on Texas, a market it has served since 1962 and where its client count exceeds that of any other US state. In August 2024, the bank hired a seven-person team from JPMorgan to launch a mortgage capital-markets business in Houston. Earlier this year, the bank struck a deal to buy Maple Financial Holdings Inc., the owner of a small Texas commercial bank, enabling Scotiabank to provide clients with FDIC-insured deposits.
Machen has emphasized an originate and distribute rhythm. The idea is to make loans, sell them to other investors when possible, free up capital and recycle it. He says that delivers better profitability, shorter durations and stronger liquidity, and it gets bankers in front of clients more often.
That thinking is also behind bigger investments in transaction banking and pushing that platform beyond Canada. Deposits in the transaction-banking division rose 12% in the latest quarter from a year earlier, with the strongest growth in Canada and the US. In his words, it is very hands-on work and sits at the core of the entire strategy.
If you hold Canadian or US bank stocks, the read-through is simple. Scotiabank is tightening its focus on cross-border sectors and the US, pairing a Midtown footprint with Texas growth, a deeper transaction-banking bench and a measured hiring spree. Machen summed up the playbook this way: win at home first, then scale from there.
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