TOP 100 | LEADERS

Title: Chief Executive Officer Company: Royal Bank of Canada Industry: Banking

A trade war makes bankers into statesmen, ready or not. Dave McKay has run Royal Bank of Canada since 2014, long enough to double its scale, swallow HSBC Canada in the country’ s biggest bank deal and build Borealis AI into frontier research. Now he steers Canada’ s largest financial institution through its roughest patch with Washington, tariffs biting clients on both sides. McKay, who started at RBC as a co-op student programming computers, meets the moment with a technologist’ s calm. When Ottawa wants corporate Canada’ s view, his phone rings first. businesschief. com 73