VersaBank
Canadian bank

VersaBank is a Canadian chartered bank headquartered in London, Ontario.
Formerly known as the Pacific & Western Bank of Canada, it was founded as a trust company in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, in 1980 and later moved its head offices to London, Ontario. On August 1, 2002, it was granted a Schedule I Canadian chartered bank licence by the Canadian federal government, the first in approximately 18 years. The bank is publicly traded as VBNK on both the Toronto Stock Exchange and on the Nasdaq.
History
In 1993, David Taylor and a group of investors acquired Pacific & Western Trust, a small trust company with six branches and a need for capital investment, and transformed it into the world's first branchless, electronic bank. In 2002, it became a Schedule 1 bank.
By 2013, the bank became Canada's tenth largest publicly traded bank when it began trading on the Toronto Stock Exchange.
The bank's deposits are raised digitally by way of a comprehensive broker network situated throughout Canada. In 2016, there were over 120 deposit broker firms raising its deposits, including many of the in-house brokerage firms of the big six Canadian banks. Its lending portfolio consists of commercial and corporate lending, real estate and development financing, and an innovative, electronic receivable purchase program.
The public source identifies “VersaBank” as canadian bank. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around VersaBank, Canadian and bank.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2045484. VIAF identifies the subject as 124272948. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1980, 2002, 1993 and 2013.
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This entry incorporates text from “VersaBank” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.