TD is winning more Wall Street business trading bonds, and doing it with fewer people. The Canadian bank has built up a computer-driven trading team over the past few years that has helped it rise up the US league tables in investment grade corporate bond transactions on the biggest venue for electronic bond trading, MarketAxess Holdings Inc. The bank rose from 20th in 2021, to 9th last year and 6th so far this year — leapfrogging bigger banks like JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Citigroup Inc. in total number of trades — and it is now at the top of the tables for municipal bond trading. To do this, it has doubled its automation team in the last four years and poached automation experts from rivals like JPMorgan. But the algorithmic trading has allowed it to shed even more employees from the ranks of old-school voice traders who used to dominate the fixed income world from their phones, according to the co-heads of TD Securities Automated Trading, Marty Mannion and Matt Schrager. The changes at TD offer a window into the automation that is sweeping the fixed income industry more broadly and making jobs redundant across Wall Street. Last year, 48% of US investment-grade bonds traded electronically, up from 34% in 2021, according to Crisil Coalition Greenwich. Schrager and Mannion declined to offer a specific number of jobs that have been reduced and said that humans continue to be a necessary part of their operation, in part to oversee the computers and in part to handle trades that are large or require the discretion that a phone conversation can offer. But they estimate that more than 90% of transactions will eventually be automated. TD’s efforts to take advantage of this are a central part of the bank’s ambitions to join the big leagues on Wall Street. The push is particularly important for TD because it is trying to recover from one of the worst money-laundering scandals in US banking history, which led to a $3.1 billion fine and a cap on the size of its US retail banking business.