Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce

Who owns CIBC?

CIBC is a public company owned by shareholders, with no controlling holder. Its shares trade on the Toronto and New York stock exchanges under the ticker CM.

When was CIBC founded?

The current bank formed in 1961 through the merger of the Canadian Bank of Commerce and the Imperial Bank of Canada, both founded in Toronto in the 1860s and 1870s.

What is CIBC Caribbean?

CIBC Caribbean is the bank's Barbados-headquartered Caribbean subsidiary, 91.67 percent owned, serving more than 526,000 customers across 10 countries. CIBC agreed in May 2026 to sell it to Butterfield Bank for approximately US$1.6 billion.

Is CIBC leaving the Caribbean?

Yes, pending closing. The May 2026 agreement transfers its Caribbean stake to Butterfield Bank in exchange for cash and roughly a 22 percent stake in the combined bank, expected to complete in the first half of 2027.

How large is CIBC?

One of Canada's Big Six banks, with over CAD 28 billion in annual revenue, approximately 48,000 employees, and assets exceeding CAD 1 trillion.

CIBC's lineage combines two of Canada's oldest banks. The Canadian Bank of Commerce was founded in Toronto in 1867, the year of Confederation, while the Imperial Bank of Canada, also Toronto-based, opened in 1875. Both built national branch networks and rode the country's western expansion; the Commerce even operated briefly in frontier gold-rush towns.

The two merged in 1961 to form the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, creating a bank large enough to compete with Royal Bank and Bank of Montreal. Post-merger decades brought firsts: Canada's first 24-hour cash machines, the launch of the Wood Gundy brokerage acquisition in 1988, and expansion into US investment banking through CIBC Oppenheimer in the 1990s.

The 2000s delivered a painful chapter. CIBC's US structured-finance exposures produced multibillion-dollar losses in the 2007 to 2009 credit crisis, among the worst Canadian bank outcomes of that period, forcing capital raises and a strategy reset toward its domestic franchise. It exited its US retail banking ambitions and refocused on Canadian banking, wealth, and capital markets.

Rebuilding defined the 2010s: the bank acquired Atlantic Trust Private Wealth Management in 2014 and Chicago-based PrivateBancorp in 2017 for US$5 billion, re-entering the US through commercial and wealth rather than retail. It launched the no-fee digital bank Simplii Financial in 2017 after losing its President's Choice Financial partnership, and moved into its CIBC Square headquarters in 2021.

Under CEO Victor Dodig since 2014, the bank has emphasized its Canadian core plus the US commercial-wealth build-out. The Caribbean exit closes the last major international retail operation: after a failed 2019 sale to GNB Financial and a canceled 2018 US listing attempt, the May 2026 Butterfield agreement, pending a first-half 2027 close, will end nearly a century of direct Caribbean retail banking.

CIBC regularly appears in Canadian customer satisfaction and digital banking rankings, and its Simplii brand has scored well in J.D. Power self-directed banking studies. The bank's CIBC Square headquarters has won architecture and sustainability awards, and the institution holds investment-grade ratings from all major agencies.

As a federally regulated Canadian bank, CIBC operates under OSFI oversight and is designated a domestic systemically important bank. Past controversies include its outsized 2007 to 2009 credit-crisis losses, periodic AML and compliance penalties typical of large banks, and a drawn-out three-attempt process to exit Caribbean banking, the first blocked by regulators over buyer uncertainty.

The pending Butterfield sale requires approvals across multiple Caribbean jurisdictions before the expected first-half 2027 close.