Toronto-Dominion Bank

The Toronto-Dominion Bank (French: Banque Toronto-Dominion) is a Canadian multinational
banking and financial services corporation headquartered in Toronto. Commonly known as TD and operating as TD Bank Group (French: Groupe Banque TD), the bank was created in 1955 through the merger of the Bank of Toronto and the Dominion Bank, which were founded in 1855 and 1869, respectively.

TD Bank Group is the second largest bank in Canada by market capitalization and a top-10 bank in North America. Globally, it ranks as the 19th largest bank in the world, according to Forbes.
The bank and its subsidiaries have over 85,000 employees and over 22 million clients worldwide. In Canada, the bank operates as TD Canada Trust and serves more than 11 million customers at over 1,150 branches. In the United States, the company operates as TD Bank (the initials are used officially for all U.S. operations). The U.S. subsidiary was created through the merger of TD Banknorth and Commerce Bank, and serves more than 6.5 million customers with a network of more than 1,300 branches in the eastern United States.
The company is ranked at number 66 on the Forbes Global 2000 2015 listing. In October 2008, the company was named in the listings of Canada's Top 100 Employers in Maclean's and Greater Toronto's Top Employers by the Toronto Star. Furthermore, in February 2011, it was named one of Canada's top 10 employers by the Financial Post.

History

The origins of the Toronto-Dominion Bank lie in the efforts of a group of businessmen in the Province of Canada West (as Ontario was called between 1840 and 1867), involved in the buying, milling and marketing of grain. They were determined to create a financial institution to meet their specific needs in banking, insurance and commodities exchange. The group submitted its first petition for the incorporation of the Millers, Merchants and Farmers Bank of Canada West in 1854 to the legislature of the province of Canada, which rejected the request. However, on March 18, 1855, their application for a charter for the Bank of Toronto, with an authorized capital of £500,000, was granted.
In July 1856, the Bank of Toronto opened its offices at 78 Church Street, Toronto, with a staff of three and immediately began development of a provincial network of branches. In 1860, it opened its first branch outside of Ontario, in Montreal.

The Bank of Toronto established itself as an efficient, profitable, but essentially conservative bank through the 19th century. It maintained a very high reserve against its capital and enjoyed the highest share price of any bank in Canada. Growth was very slow and deliberate with a few new branches opened in emerging regional centres. Core customers remained farmers, merchants, and processors of farm products (millers, brewers, distillers).

In 1871, a group of entrepreneurs and professionals under the leadership of James Austin launched the Dominion Bank to join the Bank of Toronto in the Ontario market. They were dedicated to creating a new institution "conducive to the general prosperity of that section of the country." Like the Bank of Toronto, the Dominion Bank was a cautious institution, "selecting its customers carefully, serving them well, and duly prospering with them" (in the words of the official history). It also created a network of branches, and in 1872 became the first Canadian bank to have two branches in one city – Toronto.

With the maturing of the Canadian economy and the opening of northern Ontario and the West in the 1880s and 1890s, the banks became more aggressive in loans to resource industries, utilities, and manufacturing. In 1897, the Dominion Bank opened its first western branch in Winnipeg and two years later the Bank of Toronto opened a branch in the British Columbia mining town of Rossland. In the first decade of the twentieth century, the banks rapidly expanded their branch networks in central Canada and across the west.

To mark their rise as significant national institutions, the Dominion Bank moved into a large new head office building at the corner of King and Yonge Streets in Toronto in 1879 and the Toronto Bank followed with another landmark head office at King and Bay Street in 1913.]
World War I brought new challenges for the two banks when they were called upon to finance war expenditures and to support the innovation of war bonds marketed to the general public. Half the staff of the two banks served in the armed forces.

Except for some contraction in the western provinces due to drought, the decade following the war was one of expansion and increasing profitability due to resource development and industrial expansion. Both banks weathered the storm of depression in the 1930s without great difficulty, despite a decline in earnings. Like all Canadian banks, they endured criticism of their credit policies and resisted the creation of a central bank to control the money supply and advise on fiscal policy. Ultimately the Bank of Canada was established in 1934 and by 1949, private banks were ordered to remove their currency from circulation.

The Travelers Companies

The Travelers Companies is an American insurance company. It is the second largest writer of U.S. commercial property casualty insurance and the third largest writer of U.S. personal insurance through independent agents. Travelers is incorporated in Minnesota, with headquarters in New York City and its largest office in Hartford, Connecticut. Travelers also maintains a large office in St. Paul, Minnesota. It has been a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average since June 8, 2009.

The company has field offices in every U.S. state, plus operations in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Singapore, China, Canada, and Brazil. In 2014, the company reported revenues of US $27 billion and total assets of US $103 billion.

Travelers, through its subsidiaries and approximately 14,000 independent agents and brokers, provides commercial and personal property and casualty insurance products and services to businesses, government units, associations, and individuals. The company offers insurance through three segments:

Personal Insurance, which includes home, auto and other insurance products for individuals

Business Insurance, which includes a broad array of property and casualty insurance and insurance-related services in the United States

Bond and Specialty Insurance, which includes surety, crime, and financial liability businesses which primarily use credit-based underwriting processes, as well as property and casualty products that are predominantly marketed on an international basis.

History

Saint Paul Fire and Marine Insurance Co. was founded March 5, 1853, in St. Paul, Minnesota, serving local customers who were having a difficult time getting claim payments in a timely manner from insurance companies on the east coast of the United States. It barely survived the Panic of 1857 by dramatically paring down its operations and later reorganizing itself into a stock company (as opposed to a mutual company). It soon spread its operations across the country. In 1998 it acquired USF&G, known formerly as United States Fidelity and Guaranty Company, an insurance company based in Baltimore, Maryland, but was forced to downsize by almost half due to a competitive marketplace.

Travelers was founded in 1864 in Hartford. It was originally founded to provide travel insurance to railroad travelers at a time when travel was far more risky and dangerous than today, hence the name. Along the way it had many industry firsts, including the first automobile policy, the first commercial airline policy, and the first policy for space travel. By the early 1990s, Travelers was predominantly a general property and casualty insurer that also happened to do some travel insurance on the side, and it quietly exited its original business in 1993. What was left of Travelers' travel insurance business was acquired by a private entrepreneur and is now known as Travel Insured International.

The Travelers logo, ca. 1993

In the 1990s, it went through a series of mergers and acquisitions. It was bought by Primerica in 1993, but the resulting company retained the Travelers name. In 1995 it became The Travelers Group. It bought Aetna's property and casualty business in 1996.

In 1998, the Travelers Group merged with Citicorp to form Citigroup. However, the synergies between the banking and insurance arms of the company did not work as well as planned, so Citigroup spun off Travelers Property and Casualty into a subsidiary company in 2002, although it kept the red umbrella logo. Three years later, Citigroup sold Travelers Life & Annuity to MetLife. In 2003,Travelers bought renewal rights for Royal & SunAlliance Personal Insurance and Commercial businesses.

In 2004, the St. Paul and Travelers Companies merged and renamed itself St. Paul Travelers, with the headquarters set in St. Paul, Minnesota. In August of that year, it was charged of misleading statements associated with the merger.Despite many assurances from CEO Jay Fishman that the newly formed company would retain the St. Paul name, the corporate name only lasted until 2007, when the company repurchased the rights to the famous red umbrella logo from Citigroup and readopted it as its main corporate symbol, while also changing the corporate name to The Travelers Companies.

Notably, many of Travelers' ancestor companies, such as St. Paul and USF&G, are still around today and still write policies and accept claims, but only on paper. As is typical of most insurers in the United States, Travelers never dissolved the various companies it acquired, but simply made them wholly owned subsidiaries and trained its employees to act on behalf of those subsidiaries. This is a common risk management strategy used by U.S. insurance groups. If any one company in the group gets hit with too many claims, the situation can be easily contained to that one company (which is placed in runoff and allowed to run its policies to completion), while the remainder of the group continues to operate normally.