RY vs ARM Comparison

Royal Bank of Canada is one of the two largest banks in Canada, with around CAD 2.3 trillion in assets at the end of fiscal 2025. It is a diversified financial services company, offering personal and commercial banking, wealth management, insurance, corporate banking, and capital markets services. The bank is concentrated in Canada and has dominant market shares. RBC also has wealth and capital market businesses in the US, UK, and other countries. RBC is a top 15 investment bank globally.

Arm Holdings is the IP owner and developer of the Arm architecture, which is used in 99% of the world's smartphone CPU cores. It also has high market share in other battery-powered devices like wearables, tablets, and sensors. Arm licenses its architecture for a fee, offering different types of licenses depending on the flexibility the customer needs. Customers like Apple or Qualcomm buy architectural licenses, which allow them to modify the architecture and add or delete instructions to tailor the chips to their specific needs. Other clients directly buy off-the-shelf designs from Arm. Both off-the-shelf and architectural customers pay a royalty fee per chip shipped. In 2026, Arm announced the launch of its own CPU products on top of its existing royalty business.