As he prepares to retire after a 40-year career in banking, RBC’s Andrew Arnott has no regrets about staying in Ottawa from the very beginning.
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As he prepares to retire after a 40-year career in banking, RBC’s Andrew Arnott has no regrets about staying in Ottawa from the very beginning.Â
The current managing director and head of RBC’s corporate client group covering Ontario North and East, Arnott announced last month that he will be shifting his focus to family, fitness and travel following his retirement on Dec. 31.Â
On Friday, he told OBJ that he received his first RBC paycheck in “the dark ages of 1985,” and has stuck with the company for all but two years of his career.Â
“I was a summer intern by happenstance, and because I worked at RBC during the summer, the recruiting arm reached out to me as a newly minted undergrad,” he said. “I started thinking, you know, I’m kind of tired of school. Maybe I’ll put a pause on law school. That’s how I got started.”
From there, he said he climbed the ladder, holding multiple roles at the branch level in his 20s before moving to the commercial side where he took on more senior leadership positions, including vice-president of commercial financial services in 2008.Â
“In 2007, I was leading a tech banking team — OBJ called us the most influential banking team in Ottawa back in the day. We were on the cover,” said Arnott, who is also a former OBJ Forty Under 40 recipient. “But RBC got a little jittery with tech, especially around the financial crisis, so I decided to take a little break.”Â
He spent two years at BDC as director of subordinate financing before returning to RBC in 2012. He’s been with the company since.Â
His entire career, he added, has been spent in Ottawa.
“I’m one of the few examples of being able to run the gamut without ever having to leave Ottawa,” said Arnott. “Usually, executives get flown in. You do your four to five years, then leave Ottawa. I’m the only one who has been able to grow up to the executive level here. I’m hoping that, because of me, there will be a few more examples in the future.”
Arnott said banking today is a different world from when he started.Â
“So much has happened,” he said. “Think, of course, of the internet. When I started, we didn’t have email. We were just rolling out banking (ATM) machines. Visa and credit cards were just rolling out. It’s been a massive shift.”
In more recent years, he said the industry has navigated the ups and downs of a pandemic, the emergence of artificial intelligence and, now, geopolitical and trade tensions with the United States.Â
“Most Canadian banks have very considerable U.S. operations,” he said. “As an industry, we’re all learning as we go, to a certain extent. You may recall that (U.S. President Donald) Trump even took aim at the banks here in Canada, suggesting we haven’t been good for North America.”
Banks like RBC, he added, often get the first glimpse of where trouble might be brewing under difficult economic conditions. So far, he said, the industry is holding fast.Â
“We’re a bit like the canary in the coal mine,” he said. “We see industries that are most disrupted quickly, because we extend credit to those industries. What we’ve all been grappling with in the last 12 months is how do we be patient and flexible? The extrapolation is that we’re doing okay. The GDP is okay, the banks are okay and have increased provision for credit loss this year because we’re all watching things so carefully.”
In Ottawa, one sector is doing particularly well. Arnott said most of his time in commercial corporate banking has been spent working with the tech sector and, in his current role, his clients include large public enterprises such as Ottawa’s Calian Group.Â
While Ottawa’s tech landscape looks different now than it did in the early 2000s, Arnott said that in recent years the city has built up the infrastructure to support rising tech companies and the market could be primed for another big boom in the coming years.Â
“I think we all long for the days when Nortel and the telecoms were on fire; we were bringing in over a billion dollars in venture capital a year and most of that came to RBC,” he said.Â
With the federal government looking to put money toward innovation, Arnott said Ottawa stakeholders are looking for ways to draw in investments. “With the tech sector now, I think we’ve got the foundation to see another group rise. Whether it’s defence, AI, security or crypto. I’m thinking about cyber and encryption. There’s a lot of horsepower we can bring in this new defence security world.”
At 60, Arnott said he intends to enjoy the next decade of his life by focusing on family and friends, health and fitness and by travelling as much as he can. But he still intends to remain open to the opportunities that may come his way.Â
“The future looks really bright for Ottawa,” he said. “On the one hand, locally, we worry about the austerity budget and, oh my gosh, there might be federal government layoffs. My thought would be, there’s so much more we could do beyond just being a government town. That's where we all want Ottawa to go and I think the future is pretty bright.”
