The following is an excerpt from an article originally published in The Sunday Times on September 27, 2026.
Dave McKay can vividly recall the day he came from school in Montreal to find his mum in tears.
"She said, ‘Dad died.’ She collapsed in my arms … He’d had a heart attack on a ski hill" says McKay, who was 13 at the time.
Now 62, he draws on the tragic experience to explain his “quiet confidence” that he would become chief executive of one of the biggest banks in the world — Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) — and his theory that it fuelled the leadership ambition he harboured from the age of 21.
“I’ve had this discussion with a number of people, CEOs. There is a high degree of correlation in having early childhood trauma, family trauma, and success in leadership — that something happens when your father dies and you’re the eldest and you have to get by. You either make it and adjust and grow fast and mature … or you don’t make it,” he says.
"There was something about that experience that when you get through it, you’re strong internally."
McKay was 50 when he reached his goal of becoming RBC’s chief in 2014. Since then, he has become a fixture on the Davos scene at the World Economic Forum, comfortable rubbing shoulders with world leaders and top executives, although he has a lower profile in Britain — until now.
Under his leadership, RBC — or “Royal”, as it is known to some old hands — has expanded outside its native Canada. Listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange, it is the tenth most valuable bank in the world, worth about $276bn, more than any British bank other than HSBC, after a push into America and a move into investment banking and wealth management. In Britain it employs 5,000 people out of a global workforce of nearly 100,000.
RBC has been in expansion mode since 2022 following the £1.6bn acquisition of Brewin Dolphin; it is now the fifth-largest wealth manager in the UK.
The bank has been reporting record pre-tax profits — C$6bn for the third quarter of 2026 — but the shares have slipped from all-time highs and McKay’s challenge is to keep the momentum going at a time when Canada’s economy is under pressure from President Trump’s tariff war.
Yet on his visit to the bank’s London outpost in the City, McKay is upbeat. He proves to be an easy raconteur, holding forth on topics ranging from the 1990s grunge band Pearl Jam — whom he has seen live 35 times — to the proliferation of AI; he has a customised CEO “agent” that he taps each morning to scrutinise the bank’s performance.
McKay is particularly outspoken on what Britain can learn from his own country. He attended Canada’s investment summit this month, hosted by the prime minister Mark Carney, the former governor of the Bank of England. Carney is fighting back against Trump’s tariffs, which are estimated to have knocked Canada’s economic growth by half.
McKay credits Carney for making an eye-catching announcement at the summit on tax deductions for capital investment. “The UK has to follow suit,” he says, adding: “When the UK flirts with nationalising your Thames Water, with putting on a bank tax, with putting a capital tax on the wealthy or housing, it sends a signal you want to harvest your economy, not grow it.”
At a time when there has been focus on the hedge fund manager Chris Rokos leaving Britain for Greece, McKay offers the observation that his British clients are also starting to head for the exit. “The UK doesn’t sound like it understands how easy it is for capital to leave and move,” he says.
While the government does not always act in an anti-business way, he is “worried they will”. “The narrative I’m worried about [is], ‘Let’s tax the banks, let’s tax wealthy individuals — that’s easy to do.’ We’re seeing a lot of our clients leave the UK. They’re leaving for Milan. They’re leaving for Dubai. They’re leaving for Greece, the Cayman Islands,” he says.
McKay suggests that some clients of Brewin Dolphin — who are affluent rather than ultra-wealthy — are selling their shares in portfolios overseen by the wealth manager. “They are struggling with affordability, so they are liquidating their assets to make ends meet.”
"I used to take the newspaper at eight years old and go through the stock page. I would track those stocks every day…I had this hunger for business."
Dave McKay, President & CEO, Royal Bank of Canada
RBC’s chief executive has British roots. Three of his grandparents were from Glasgow — explaining the origins of his name — but he is a bilingual Canadian, speaking both English and French. “My father always viewed being bilingual as really important,” says McKay. His paternal grandmother was from Paris and emigrated with her new husband, whom she had met after the First World War, to Montreal. His paternal grandfather ended up as a bodyguard for the Molson beer family.
His own father fought in the Second World War, gained a degree at McGill University in Montreal and set up a business that imported lighting from Italy. “It was beautiful lighting for high-end homes and offices and we had to rewire it for our Canadian electrical standards, which I learnt to do at eight years old,” McKay recalls.
Business was an early interest. “I used to take the newspaper at eight years old and go through to the stock page. I would track those stocks every day… I had this hunger for business since I was a kid,” he says.
After McKay’s father died, his mother — “my hero” — took on running the business and being the sole parent to him and his siblings, who were ten and six at the time.
But he never wanted to run the family firm. “I always thought I was going to have to take over the company from her … I didn’t really want to spend my life running a lighting business — nothing wrong with it [though]. When she sold the company [in my late teens] that’s what freed me to pursue my own path, I think she did it for that reason,” he says.
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