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The retail banking arm of Bank of Nova Scotia has promoted equity research analyst Sumit Malhotra to be its new chief financial officer.

As managing director of Canadian financial services, Mr. Malhotra is an analyst currently in charge of Scotiabank’s coverage of the country’s banks and their stocks. Starting June 8, he will become senior vice-president and chief financial officer for Canadian banking, which is Scotiabank’s largest division and generates roughly half of its profits.

The bank has hired Meny Grauman, who covered Canada’s banks as co-head of equity research at Cormark Securities Inc., to succeed Mr. Malhotra as managing director of financial services in its equity research department. Mr. Grauman has worked at Cormark since 2013; he starts at Scotiabank on June 15.

Mr. Malhotra is highly regarded among banking analysts. After seven years at Scotiabank, following stints at Macquarie Capital Markets and Merrill Lynch Canada, he has deep technical knowledge of the banking industry’s financial workings. Yet he is making a rare leap by moving straight from the analyst’s chair to manage the finances of a division that earned nearly $14-billion in revenue and $4.4-billion in profit last year. And he is doing so in the midst of a global health crisis that has cut Canadian banks’ profits in half and promises to send loan losses surging.

He will report jointly to Raj Viswanathan, chief financial officer for all of Scotiabank, and Dan Rees, group head of Canadian banking.

This is the second time an analyst covering Canadian banks has received a major promotion this year. In March, analyst Rob Sedran was named CIBC’s senior vice-president for enterprise strategy, planning and corporate development, after serving as the bank’s head of research and leading coverage of Canadian banks.

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