Stymiest, Barbara G.

CONVOCATION, OCTOBER, 2005
BARBARA STYMIEST
to be Doctor of Letters

Barbara Stymiest is one of Canada's top business leaders, ranked among the 100 most powerful women in the land. She has won that recognition for her five years as Chief Executive Officer of the TSX Group, operators of Canada's leading securities market, the Toronto Stock Exchange, and more recently as the Chief Operating Officer of the RBC Financial Group, once simply the Royal Bank of Canada. Whether at TSX or RBC, she has been valued for her quick grasp of problems and challenges, her fearless determination to adapt to changing conditions, and her commitment to making her company the best in its field. After twenty-five years in the work-force, she is at the top of her game.

What is a matter of especial pride and delight for us is that this remarkable woman considers New Brunswick to be "home." Despite the fact that she was born in Toronto and was educated in Ontario schools, she grew up in a transplanted New Brunswick family who regularly returned to the family cottage at Tabusintac. The family's roots in the Miramichi area go back over 200 years when Benjamin Stymiest was cutting timber at Tabusintac, and over time, marriage connections linked the family with the Willistons and Murrays, the O'Briens and the Wassons, the Palmers and Spences, Skidds, Jardines, Hierlehys, and McCallums, a veritable Who's Who of Miramichi family names. Family lure and the family cottage convinced a young Barbara that New Brunswick was in her blood.

By profession, Barbara Stymiest is a Chartered Accountant. She obtained her degree in Honours Business Administration from the Richard Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario. She earned her accreditation as a CA in 1980, and has been a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Ontario ever since. From early on, she entered the audit practice with a focus on financial services and rose through several management positions to become a partner in the Financial Services Group of Ernst & Young in Toronto. Here one can find the pattern of her future career being mapped out as she assumed direct responsibility for the audit of several large clients, including one of Canada's major banks, and headed up the firm's National Securities Industry Specialization Group, which provided technical services to the securities industry. The prescient might have seen her heading towards either the banking or the securities sector. As her life path unfolded, she found herself in both.

Since 1992, Ms. Stymiest has held senior executive positions in three major Canadian financial institutions. For seven years, she was Executive Vice-President & Chief Financial Officer at BMO Nesbitt Burns. Here, she not only assumed responsibility for the overall management of a major investment dealer, but also for the financial management of the Investment and Corporate banking sector of the Bank of Montreal. In 1999, she shifted gears by becoming the Chief Executive Officer of the Toronto Stock Exchange, where she completed its transformation into a publicly traded company, TSX Group Inc., created a new management team, revolutionized the company's information technology system, completed the acquisition of the Canadian Venture Exchange (now the TSX Venture Exchange), and steered the acquisition of the NGX, the energy exchange. In a word, she made the TSX what it is today, the leading securities exchange in the country with global outreach and global ambitions.

Just a year and a half ago, Barbara Stymiest was here at UNB to deliver a stimulating lecture entitled "Putting Canadian Capital Markets in Order." Canada, she warned, needed a single set of regulations governing securities exchanges if Canada was to participate fully in the global securities market of the present. Information technology, she pointed out, has transformed the way the world does business, and it no longer makes sense for every province to police itself. What she said illustrates well both her style and her business acumen. She is a no-nonsense, practical, forward-thinking person who can communicate the complex with crystal clarity to any audience. She showed her UNB audience why she is ranked among Canada's top business leaders.

As if following the old adage that if you stand still you will rust, Ms. Stymiest accepted a new challenge last November when she became Chief Operating Officer of the RBC Financial Group. Already she is making her mark there, promoting its role as Canada's largest bank in terms of market capitalization, and its prominence outside of Canada in its chosen niches of the global economy.

In her amazing career, Barbara Stymiest has remained attached to guiding principles that have shaped both her direction and her success. Whatever her attachment to family, past, and locale, she is a global thinker. She is a champion of the concept of a global market in goods and services, and she has insisted that every institution she has served "get with it." With the advantages of information technology, she has envisioned a business environment of instant choices, global capital resources, and global opportunities in which Canadians can play a role second to none. Whether in securities regulation or international banking, her rule of thumb is uncomplicated: streamline and simplify to give the client what the client wants. Be the best in your field, whatever that is.

Barbara Stymiest's rules of performance set admirable standards for today's graduates. How lucky we are that she is here today to cement one more tie to the province she calls "home." It is our privilege to now rank her among our degree-recipients.

From: Honoris Causa - UA Case 70, Box 4