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As a top executive at CIBC, Laura Dottori-Attanasio was one of the most senior women in Canadian banking—and she was well-placed to succeed Victor Dodig as CEO, which put her in rare air on Bay Street. She’d spent seven years as the bank’s chief risk officer, a crucial position at any financial institution in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, when scores of banks nearly blew up. In March 2020, she took over personal and business banking—CIBC’s profit centre.
There have been some serious bumps along the way, but what’s made Element’s rise so impressive is that its core business model—leasing and servicing fleets of vehicles for corporate clients, such as service vans for cable companies, passenger cars for pharmaceutical reps and small refrigerated trucks for milk producers—isn’t tied to a hot economic trend, like soaring e-commerce sales during the COVID-19 pandemic. Element’s just really good at what it does.
By 2007, on the executive track at National Bank, she moved back to Montreal, where she made the pivot into risk management to help broaden her expertise. But just a year in, the political infighting reached obscene levels, according to executives intimately familiar with the situation, and she became a casualty of friendly fire. Four months later, in January 2009, CIBC hired her as its head of corporate banking.
It took a few years, but Element’s operations stabilized, and management started promoting a “capital-light” business model. That may not sound all that sexy, but it’s the kind of thing that makes institutional investors drool. Element isn’t in the business of owning cars and trucks—it just finances leases for its clients—and big-name investors tend to like this model because they don’t get stuck holding onto assets that lose value as they age.
Again, Dottori-Attanasio sees parallels between Element’s model and her past life in banking. To win retail clients, banks often lead with the mortgage, then they try to add on services by cross-selling things like wealth management advice.
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