TD Bank Reportedly Close to $1B Deal for Investment Bank Cowen

Toronto-Dominion Bank (TD Bank) is close to a deal to buy investment bank Cowen for $1 billion, sources told The Wall Street Journal.

The report notes that buying Cowen would give TD Bank a larger presence in investment banking as well as in the U.S., where it’s been expanding.

Cowen would help TD Bank get more traditional investment banking capabilities, along with investment research and management.

TD Bank is a big dealmaker, having agreed in February to buy First Horizon for $13.4 billion, which was also the first major acquisition in the U.S. for CEO Bharat Masrani. It was, in addition, the biggest deal TD has completed.

Since then, Masrani has signaled that the bank could be open to more purchases.

PYMNTS quoted TD Bank’s Paul Margarites, head of commercial digital platforms, as saying small businesses have new needs and wants in the wake of the changes in how business is done.

The pandemic was an easy accelerator of this, making it so stores had to close down and small businesses had to adopt new digital ways of working to stay competitive.

Margarites said small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) expect and need financial service providers to offer digital solutions, with financial institutions having to meet that demand and understand the expectations.

See also: TD Bank on Meeting SMBs’ Digital Needs

According to him, SMBs in these times want to send and receive money quickly and securely using numerous pay rails, and they also want good cash management solutions. He said businesses are now looking more at replacing their manual cash management processes with digital ones.

“Treasury teams must operate efficiently to appropriately manage their liquidity and ensure the business can grow,” he said. “To continue to operate effectively, they need tools that will improve automation and reduce the chance of errors.”

He explained that the most helpful treasury tools can automate parts of the cash cycle and also give business owners data and analytics to help their decision making.