The world's largest custody bank refused to hand over its records. The country's top court noticed.
Canada's top court found the world's largest custody bank breached a data deal, then withheld records showing how widely it shared the information.
The Supreme Court of Canada, in a decision released July 31, 2026, sided with a Canadian data provider in its dispute with a global custodial bank, sending the question of damages back to a lower court for a fresh calculation.
The case centres on proprietary pricing data. The data provider is the world's largest hedge fund and private equity administrator, licensing specialized data that financial firms use to value securities. The bank is the world's largest custodial institution, with more than US$35 trillion in assets under custody, and paid for the data under a 1999 agreement that ran for nearly 17 years.
The contract was clear on one point: the bank could not share, redistribute, or sell the data to other parties, including its own subsidiaries and affiliates. The data provider's core claim was that the bank did exactly that, funneling the data to as many as 65 affiliated entities and collecting payments for it, in breach of the deal.
Licensing of this kind was priced per security, not per use, so a single purchase could quietly serve a whole corporate family. The data provider only discovered the arrangement in October 2016, after a system glitch revealed that a Canadian joint venture co-owned by the bank had kept receiving the data free of charge years after its own contract ended.
What turned a contract dispute into something larger was what the bank did next. When the data provider asked it to preserve records showing how the data had been shared and how much the bank had earned, the bank refused. The Court of Appeal for Ontario found the bank had committed spoliation - the intentional destruction or concealment of evidence - saying its conduct smacked of contempt for the justice system.
The Supreme Court agreed on that point, in its first substantive look at the doctrine since 1896. Once spoliation is proven, the court held, judges have no discretion: they must draw an inference against the offending party strong enough to fill the gap left by the missing evidence.
Where the trial judge went wrong, the court found, was in the remedy. He had awarded the data provider US$5,696,850 using what he called a "rateable approach," pricing only the data the bank could not account for. The court called that figure untethered from the facts, noting it treated the case as though a single entity had accessed the data once, despite up to 65 entities having access for years. The data provider had sought far more - a global figure of US$889,752,087.
The result is a reset, not a payout. The court set aside the damages award and returned the matter to the Ontario Superior Court to recalculate what the data provider is owed, this time drawing the adverse inferences the missing evidence demands.
For compliance officers, the message is direct. A firm that destroys or withholds relevant records once litigation is on the horizon now faces a mandatory presumption that the evidence would have hurt its case - no matter how strongly it believes its own position.
