Bob Grant Senior Vice-President, Global Transaction Banking Sales at Scotiabank

Like most of our customers, we recently sat down to set our revenue and sales goals for 2010. Our success is highly dependent on economic activity, trade and the success of our clients in Canada and around the world. So when we build our plans, they tend to reflect the mood and expectations of our clients.

We are optimistic — cautious, but optimistic. Times are still tough for many of our clients in the manufacturing and shipping sectors, and commodity trade remains well off its peak, even though it's improving. On the other hand, the service sector in Canada has been quite resilient. There are some positive indicators that economic momentum is building again, particularly in the recovery of the equity markets. Our clients are also beginning to see the benefits of the spending on infrastructure projects now underway. However, many economists, including Scotiabank's Warren Jestin, are predicting moderate overall growth that will probably not go up more than 2.5% in Canada and the U.S. We are not exactly roaring back and, as a result, many of our jobless will struggle to find work for some time to come.

Our clients are being prudent and many have a "wait and see" attitude in their business activities. Typically, this means a conservative approach to managing liquidity, increasing surplus deposits, monitoring credit use, and exercising discipline for new investments. Some call it a flight to safety and quality, but it is clearly just good business to mitigate risk and maintain flexibility to respond as new opportunities arise.

In these types of markets, when sales and margins are under pressure, the best practices of efficient organizations pay dividends. These are also the times when costly or less efficient processes can be recognized, and if tackled can make a big difference today and in the future. In this issue, we feature one of Canada's leading universities and how they are doing just this by implementing an expense management solution to consolidate small dollar purchases, and travel and entertainment expenses, into a single VISA* card platform — one way to make sure more money is available for research and the classroom.

Successful organizations continue to learn and change in tough times. And this is why they are optimistic about the future, even though they remain cautious today.

Bob Grant
Senior Vice-President, GTB Sales

* VISA Inc./Lic. user The Bank of Nova Scotia.