CIBC chief executive John Hunkin says the bank wealth management arm has enough brokers, and CIBC’s focus is to improve their proficiency and efficiency.

Hunkin made his remarks in a speech delivered today at National Bank Financial’s Canadian Financial Services Conference in Montreal.

“In wealth management, our strategy is built on leadership in relationship-based advice,” Hunkin explained. “We have built this business over the last five years through a combination of acquisitions and divestitures as well as internal growth. During this time, we have increased our fully accredited advisors in Canada from 700 to 2,600 and today have the advisor capacity to robustly participate in this growing market.”

“With our advisor base now at the right size, our focus moving forward will be to extend our advantage through furthering our leadership in accreditation and experience rather than increasing the number of advisors,” he said.

On the institutional side, Hunkin noted that it will continue to try to dominate the Canadian business, while picking its spots in foreign markets. “In the Canadian marketplace, we will continue to compete in every business and on every front. This means continuing to invest in our client franchise, particularly in the areas of talent, credit and risk,” he said. “We will be very targeted in everything we do in the United States, with a firm discipline around risk and profitability. Internationally, our focus will be to direct resources to activities that are aligned and connected with our North American businesses.”

Hunkin said that each of its core businesses – retail banking, wealth management and investment banking – has a growth strategy, but each can stand improvements in productivity. “Today, our productivity ratio is 4th among the Canadian banks — clearly not where we need to be,” he said. “And, for us to be competitive – we need to strike a balanced position between costs and growth. We will support top line growth through targeted investments in our existing businesses, while holding the line on costs, by eliminating duplication of effort and streamlining processes across the organization.”