The Colour of Money: Banks roll out welcome

Despite leaving behind a hot climate, their home, family, friends and well-established careers — he’s a chartered accountant, she’s a software engineer — the Raos admit the culture shock hasn’t been as jolting as they imagined. They stepped off the plane on a Friday and walked into a local Bank of Nova Scotia on Saturday. “Within 24 hours of arriving,” Mr. Rao says, “we had our social security numbers, our credit cards and a bank account.”

To show their support of multicultural customers — and their money — Canadian banks are increasingly catering their services to new immigrants like the Raos, a population that grows by about 250,000 a year in Canada. They focus mostly on Asian markets — roughly 50% of new Canadians are from China or South Asia — where cultural ideas about saving, spending and investing are often radically different.

“Moving to a new country is a very overwhelming experience,” says Manisha Burman, director of multicultural markets at Royal Bank of Canada, herself a daughter of Indian immigrants. “You have to adjust to a new socio-economic life, learn an unfamiliar language … it takes new Canadians five to 10 years to catch up to their peers, and we try to support them through that transition.”

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