180 million images, 67,000 backup disks, and a vendor TD couldn't rein in
TD Waterhouse went to court to wrest 180 million client records from its data vendor faster and cheaper. An Ontario judge said no.
The wealth management arm of The Toronto-Dominion Bank had asked the Ontario Superior Court of Justice for help enforcing an earlier injunction that ordered the return of its data. On May 14, 2026, Justice Jana Steele turned down most of what it wanted.
The dispute traces back to a relationship that began in 1999, when Electronic Imaging Systems Corporation - a firm founded by Rose Kramer in 1977 - started handling work for TD Waterhouse, at first microfilming and cheque-fraud detection. Over time EIS came to image and index TD's documents and host them on a central portal. By the time TD decided not to renew the deal in the fall of 2024, EIS was holding roughly 180 million unique customer images, covering both open and closed accounts.
Getting that data back has proven slow and costly. Last August, the court ordered EIS to return it. Nine months on, only about 5 million images had made it home. EIS says every piece of data has to be manually identified and retrieved using unique identifiers, a job it has consistently called time-consuming and expensive.
TD Waterhouse went back to court asking for two things: an order appointing KPMG Inc. as an "implementation monitor" to oversee the handover, and a finding that EIS had breached its contract - which TD hoped would lower the bill it owes for the return.
Steele handed TD a narrow win on the breach question and little else. She found a "technical breach" of the agreement because EIS had kept backup copies of TD's data on roughly 67,000 disks that also held other clients' records, against a clause requiring strict segregation. But she declined to penalize EIS for it. The backups, she noted, were EIS's own idea and ended up preserving the data after hackers attacked the company's servers in September 2025. The court found that attack was repelled and triggered no notice duty, since no data was accessed.
The judge was pointed about how TD got here. EIS had raised concerns about the swelling volume of records on more than one occasion, she noted, and TD criticized its vendor only once it grew unhappy with the time and cost of getting the data back. She quoted Kramer's complaint that TD was "criticizing its longtime partner."
Steele also rejected TD's bid to cut the cost. A KPMG report had pegged the job at under $500,000, but the judge gave it little weight because it was not based on EIS's actual system. TD must keep paying EIS at commercially reasonable rates for the work.
Finally, she extended EIS's duty to provide day-to-day transition services until 12 months after the data return is finished, with TD able to cancel on 30 days' notice. Each side will pay its own costs.
For wealth firms, the takeaway is operational, not dramatic. A decades-long outsourcing arrangement can be far harder and pricier to unwind than to enter, especially when client records sit on a vendor's hardware. As Steele noted, there is "little to no risk" TD won't get its data - but it will get it on a timeline driven by the vendor's process, at rates the court calls commercially reasonable.
