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TD Bank Group Announces Support of Healthcare Innovation and Behaviour Economics Initiatives at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management.

October 11, 2018

Toronto – TD Bank Group (TD) today announced two initiatives to invest in innovation in healthcare and behaviourial economics at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management.

Launched at the Rotman School in August 2012, the Creative Destruction Lab (CDL) aims to bring aspiring entrepreneurs and technological innovations to market. TD will become a Corporate Founding Member of the CDL Health Stream with a $2.5 million contribution over five years, operating out of the CDL-Toronto and CDL-West (Vancouver) locations. The CDL's Health Stream focuses on biotechnology, bioinformatics, diagnostics and digital care for Canadians.

"The University of Toronto has a deep history of healthcare innovation, dating back to the discovery of insulin in 1921. Thanks to TD, the Creative Destruction Lab's Health Stream can accelerate its programming and continue to build on this legacy to bring a whole new generation of medical breakthroughs to life," says Sonia Sennik, Executive Director of the Creative Destruction Lab.

"We know that the long-term success of our business depends upon the resilience and health of the people we serve. We're thrilled to support the CDL with this contribution, which will help accelerate advances in healthcare through fresh thinking and entrepreneurship," says Andrea Barrack, TD's Vice President of Global Corporate Citizenship. "At TD, we have a history and meaningful purpose of helping to enrich the lives of customers, colleagues and communities."

TD Bank Group also announced an agreement to bring additional behavioural finance resources and applications to TD Wealth clients through their support of the Rotman School’s Behavioural Economics in Action at Rotman (BEAR) research centre. By harnessing BEAR's research, TD will be able to further examine and research the underlying emotions and behaviours that drive financial decision making. Identified as the next paradigm shift in financial advice, behavioural finance is an area of study that looks at how personality influences financial decisions. More specifically, it explores why people sometimes make biased, unpredictable or irrational financial choices.

"Being one of the founding members of BEAR will further contribute to TD's commitment to advancing the study and real-life applications of behavioural finance," says Dave Kelly, senior vice president, TD Wealth Private Wealth Management. "The work we have done to-date with Rotman has been instrumental in enhancing the advice and services our advisors provide to our clients. Research by BEAR will enable us to better understand the underlying factors that help drive financial decision making so we can connect with our clients on a deeper, more meaningful level."

In addition to being one of the founding members of BEAR, TD Wealth and the Rotman School have been working collaboratively over the past three years to further the implementation of behavioural finance tools into wealth management

"We are thrilled with the support from TD Wealth as we conduct leading-edge research in behavioural economics," says Dilip Soman, Director of BEAR, Corus Chair in Communication Strategy and Professor of Marketing, Rotman School, University of Toronto. “This partnership with TD Wealth will allow us to further examine this important field of study and to develop research on tangible applications. Eventually, we would like a better understanding of the underlying motivations and behaviours that drive financial decision making, and how we can ensure that these behaviours do not negatively impact our financial investing habits."

The Creative Destruction Lab (CDL) is a seed-stage program for massively scalable, science-based companies. Its nine-month program pairs founders with experienced entrepreneurs and investors to set focused, measurable objectives with the goal of maximizing equity-value creation. Founded by Professor Ajay Agrawal in 2012 at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, the program has now expanded with locations in Vancouver, Calgary, Montreal, Halifax, and New York City.

Since its inception in 2012, companies that have participated in the CDL programs have created over $3 billion (CAD) in equity value. CDL Alumni include Thalmic Labs (Waterloo), Atomwise (San Francisco), Deep Genomics (Toronto), Nymi (Toronto), Automat (Montreal), Kyndi (Palo Alto), and Heuritech (Paris).

BEAR is a centre at the UofT’s Rotman School of Management that combines decades of research in decision-making with empirically tested tools to facilitate behavioural change. The Centre looks at social and economic problems from a behavioural science lens and designs solutions that go beyond the traditional approaches of applying incentives, penalties or provisioning information.

The Rotman School of Management is part of the University of Toronto, a global centre of research and teaching excellence at the heart of Canada’s commercial capital. Rotman is a catalyst for transformative learning, insights and public engagement, bringing together diverse views and initiatives around a defining purpose: to create value for business and society. For more information, visit www.rotman.utoronto.ca.

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For more information:

Ken McGuffin
Manager, Media Relations
Rotman School of Management
University of Toronto
Voice: 416.946.3818
E-mail: mcguffin@rotman.utoronto.ca