TD Bank 2001 Annual Report Download - page 7

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5
TO OUR SHAREHOLDERS
A clear focus
In this year’s annual report we describe our focus on investors, customers and employees.
We believe – and our experience has shown us – that the best way to run our business prof-
itably is to make sure the interests of all three are aligned. We’re serious about making sure
we’re serving our customers well, and about treating our employees the way we want them to
treat our customers – both of which contribute to increasing value for our investors.
We do this in our retail businesses by following a disciplined, analytical approach to
measuring customer and employee satisfaction, identifying problems early and solving them
as quickly as possible – an approach that’s working so well in our retail banking business
that we’re expanding it to other areas of our organization.
A successful strategy
Keeping focused requires considerable commitment, thought and planning across all of
our businesses and all levels of our organization. Fundamental to this have been our four
strategic imperatives:
•to achieve scale
•to maintain momentum
•to be where banking is going
•to engage in activities that are at least North American in scope.
Scale
Achieving scale is essential for us because, in our view, without scale it becomes increasingly
difficult to compete both internationally and at home.
At TD, we build, buy and borrow in order to achieve scale. For example, we’ve built scale
as a wholesale banker through TD Securities. We’ve bought scale through our acquisitions
of Waterhouse Investor Services, Canada Trust and Newcrest Capital. We also continue to
borrow scale by outsourcing and teaming up with other firms.
Our objective is to achieve scale as quickly as possible, but not at the expense of our
required internal rate of return. We make acquisitions only if they allow us to be a key player
in a market. For example, the acquisition and launch of TD Newcrest early in the year
strengthened TD Securities’ position in institutional equities and investment banking.
Charlie Baillie: left
Ed Clark: right