Stefanie Marotta

Stefanie Marotta covers the power and regulation of Canada’s banking system, focusing on how decisions by large lenders and their watchdogs shape customers, markets and the broader economy. She is a banking and financial regulation reporter at The Globe and Mail, reporting on the country’s biggest banks, Bay Street’s key decision-makers and the regulators that oversee them. Her work stands out for connecting executive strategy, regulatory change and competitive pressure into clear narratives about the resilience and risks of Canada’s financial sector.

Canadian banks and their leadership

Marotta’s core coverage examines Canada’s major banks through the lens of leadership decisions, compensation and strategic direction. She has reported on how RBC’s chief executive is turning to artificial intelligence to help inform his daily agenda, highlighting how technology is reshaping how top bankers manage information and risk. Her reporting on Scotiabank’s purchase of a Texas-based commercial lender as it eyes U.S. growth tracks cross-border expansion and what it signals about the bank’s strategic priorities. She also covers executive pay and retention, co-writing a piece on TD Bank granting its U.S. head a $2-million retention award, framing compensation within competitive and regulatory scrutiny of bank governance.

Beyond individual decisions, Marotta frequently links leadership choices to earnings and customer outcomes. Her coverage of consumer resilience helping to boost bank profits shows how spending patterns, credit demand and interest rate changes flow through to the bottom line. In her “Business Brief: Checking our bank balance” she introduces herself as The Globe’s banking and financial regulation reporter and walks readers through how recent events are reflected in the health of the banking system. Together, these pieces show a reporter who consistently centres bank executives’ decisions within broader questions about profitability, competitiveness and accountability.

Regulation, fintech and competition

Regulatory change and emerging competitors are a second major pillar of Marotta’s beat. She reports on banking and financial regulation, with a remit that explicitly includes the industry’s regulators alongside its largest lenders. In coverage of plans to streamline banking regulations for fintechs and credit unions, she explains how supervisors are testing pilot projects to simplify licensing and oversight while maintaining safeguards. She has written on senior bankers’ views that Canadian banks are unfazed by rising competition from fintechs and the battle for customer deposits, using executive interviews to show how incumbents assess new rivals and the durability of their funding bases.

Her work often sits at the intersection of innovation and oversight. In reporting on themes such as stablecoins, open banking and retail payments, she situates these developments within the existing regulatory framework and the push for modernization. She has also covered a major funding round for Koho as it raises $130-million and strengthens its case to become a bank, using that story to illustrate how non-bank financial firms navigate licensing hurdles and investor expectations. Across these pieces, Marotta distinguishes herself by treating fintech and regulatory reform not as isolated tech stories but as core questions about who controls deposits, data and risk in the Canadian financial system.

Risk, outages and market stress

Marotta regularly reports on moments when stress tests the banking system, from operational failures to market volatility. In her coverage of Laurentian Bank’s profit drop tied to a major system outage and restructuring efforts, she documents how technology breakdowns translate into financial charges, reputational damage and strategic overhauls. Earlier in her career, her work focused on Canada’s stock market as it whipsawed amid rising interest rates, as well as banking, real estate, cannabis and technology stocks, giving her a grounded view of how monetary policy and sector-specific shocks move asset prices and bank valuations.

That background informs current reporting on how rising competition for deposits, changing payment models and new regulatory expectations affect bank risk profiles. Whether she is looking at earnings pressure, capital questions or operational resilience, Marotta tends to frame risk as a system-wide issue rather than a single-quarter problem, showing how shocks can expose deeper structural vulnerabilities.

Explainers and audience briefings

Alongside daily and enterprise reporting, Marotta writes service-oriented pieces that help readers make sense of complex banking issues. In “Business Brief: Checking our bank balance” she offers a curated morning look at the state of Canadian banks, summarizing recent events and explaining why they matter for savers, borrowers and investors. Her explainer-style work often breaks down regulatory initiatives, technology shifts or earnings trends into plain language while preserving key details such as capital requirements, supervisory timelines and competitive dynamics.

Across newsletters, news stories and longer features, she maintains a consistent focus on clarity and impact: who is affected, what decisions are being made, and how those decisions fit into the broader architecture of Canada’s financial system. Her portfolio shows a reporter who moves easily between breaking news, in-depth features on bank culture and conduct, and accessible briefings that translate banking and regulation into terms that non-specialist audiences can use.