Toronto Leadership Award recipient: For Scotiabank’s Stella Yeung, leadership starts with trust
When Stella Yeung reflects on her more than two-decade career in technology, she doesn’t point to a single platform, transformation or award. She points to people.
“The achievement I value most isn’t a platform or an award—it’s the people and the culture we’ve built together,” said Yeung, SVP and CIO of Global Corporate Functions at Scotiabank and the recipient of the 2026 Toronto ORBIE Leadership Award.
That philosophy has shaped a career spanning continents, financial institutions, and some of banking’s most sophisticated technology environments.
Building a global perspective
Yeung was born in Hong Kong and immigrated to Canada, settling in Toronto, where she attended high school. English was her second language, after Cantonese.
Her mother, a University of Beijing graduate, was an important early influence. She encouraged Yeung to read and learn, offering quiet guidance that Yeung would come to appreciate more deeply as an adult.
An uncle introduced her to technology after she arrived in Toronto, sparking an interest in engineering and problem-solving that led her to study Computer Science and Mathematics at the University of Toronto.
That early experience also shaped her leadership philosophy.
“Being an immigrant shaped my leadership in ways that aren’t always immediately visible,” she said. “It taught me resilience and gratitude, and it made me more deliberate about creating space for others.”
Yeung began her career as a programmer in banking technology at HSBC in Hong Kong before taking on consulting roles in Boston and Frankfurt, including work on European trade floors. She later held progressively senior positions at the Toronto Stock Exchange, BMO Financial Group, and Scotiabank.
Driving innovation at scale
At Scotiabank, Yeung has led technology through some of the industry’s most complex challenges.
As VP of Global Capital Markets Technology, she delivered Bay Street’s first public cloud-hosted trading system and developed a real-time streaming architecture for data capture, analytics, and reporting.
Later, as SVP and CIO, she expanded her mandate across Global Banking & Markets, Global Risk Management, Finance, and Treasury, leading major technology initiatives and driving greater collaboration across teams.
One highlight was Scotiabank’s XVA engine, which uses AI, deep neural networks, and cloud GPUs to perform more than a billion calculations per second. The innovation was named Risk.net’s 2021 Technology Innovation of the Year.
Today, Yeung leads technology for Scotiabank’s Global Corporate Functions, supporting the systems behind Compliance, Finance, Treasury, Human Resources, Risk Management, Anti-Money Laundering, Fraud and Collections.
Her team is also helping transform the bank’s fraud technology ecosystem, building toward a global AI native platform capable of supporting more than 20 billion annual transactions by 2030.
But for Yeung, innovation is inseparable from learning.
“There is always something new to learn,” she said. “Staying at the forefront means staying curious, staying engaged with my teams, and never assuming today’s approach is good enough for tomorrow.”
Growing people and building trust
Yeung’s greatest source of pride is not the scale of the technology she has led but the people behind it.
She has invested heavily in training, mentorship, and stretch assignments, creating opportunities for employees to develop new skills and take on greater responsibility. Programs such as SkillPods, cloud bootcamps, and AI and leadership development initiatives have helped strengthen that culture.
“There’s no innovation without trust,” Yeung said.
That belief also shapes how she leads. As an immigrant and a woman in industries where she has sometimes felt overlooked, Yeung has experienced firsthand the importance of inclusion and belonging.
She now makes a point of inviting quieter voices into conversations, building psychological safety and helping others develop the confidence to lead.
Her advice to the next generation of technology leaders reflects that experience: be excellent at your craft, stay curious, build strong relationships, and take measured risks.
“Most importantly,” she said, “be passionate, be committed, be resilient—and never stop learning. Leadership isn’t about individual success; it’s about enabling the success of others.”