The Financial Post reports in its Saturday edition Norm Cappell left a senior post in the capital markets division of Royal Bank of Canada six months ago to join an upstart on-line lender. The Post's Barbara Shecter writes the 40-year-old predicts the path he took will become more worn in the coming years as increasing technological and regulatory demands, competition from new players and economic pressures start to weigh on traditional banks. Mr. Cappell is now head of capital markets at Toronto on-line lender Borrowell. "There's just been extraordinary pressure on the institutional financial world over the last 10 years by virtue of a number of things -- pressure on the technology side, pressure on the cost side, pressure on the regulatory side," he told the Post. In Canada, those pressures are combining with challenging economic times and, in particular, woes in the oil patch. With the next fiscal year looking "weak" for the banks, "net head count reductions would not be overly surprising," one analyst predicts. National Bank has already announced cuts that will affect "a few hundred" employees. Bank of Nova Scotia is cutting about 1,500 jobs across the bank's domestic and international operations.