B.C.’s biggest bank appoints a new CEO

Sandra Stuart will start June 1

A new banker in town
B.C.’s biggest bank has a new CEO. HSBC Bank Canada announced Monday that it had appointed Sandra Stuart, a veteran with the company, as its new president and chief executive officer. Stuart, who has worked for the company since the early 1980s in various IT management roles, will start June 1. Current CEO Paolo Maia, who started in the role in 2013, has been shuffled to head up the bank’s Latin American operations. Established in 1981 as a Canadian subsidiary of mega-bank HSBC, the affiliate acquired first the Bank of British Columbia and the operations of a number of foreign banks in the late 1980s and 1990s, before emerging as the largest bank by assets headquartered in B.C.

Safe space
A Kelowna company whose hundreds of servers form the hardware underpinnings of countless “clouds” has been sold for $33 million to an Ontario-based competitor. RackForce Networks announced Thursday that it had been acquired by Ontario-based TeraGo—both of which provide storage and data services to large-scale users, including the federal and provincial governments—in a cash and stock deal. 

Cash for clean cars
Good news if your eye is on a new electric vehicle: the provincial government has reinstated a $5,000 rebate on purchases of certain models. Phased out late last year, the new credit will apply to full-electric, plug-in hybrid and hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles as well as models like the Nissan Leaf and Tesla S.