Wealthsimple CEO Michael Katchen at the company’s Toronto office in July. Mr. Katchen did not expect the company to hit $100-billion in assets until December, 2028.Cole Burston/The Canadian Press
Online financial services provider Wealthsimple Technologies Inc. has surpassed $100-billion in assets three years ahead of schedule as soaring markets entice more Canadians to pour money into online trading accounts.
On Wednesday, chief executive officer Michael Katchen told an audience in Toronto that the financial services company passed $100-billion in assets under administration this month, a goal he had not expected to hit until December, 2028.
That is up from $52-billion a year ago and $31-billion at the end of 2023.
“It took 10 years to get to $50-billion. We doubled that in a single year,” he said in a speech at Evergreen Brick Works in Toronto.
The surge in assets has followed an explosive trend of Canadian investors looking to take ownership of their own savings and retirement. With the rise of social media financial influencers, a younger demographic and booming stock markets, more than 2.9 million Canadians opened trading accounts in the 12 months ended June, 2025, according to Investor Economics.
While the banks continue to dominate online trading in terms of asset size, Wealthsimple says it added more accounts and had more trading volume than any other online Canadian brokerage last year.
Discount brokerage Questrade Financial Group Inc. – a privately owned independent financial services provider – has also seen its assets under administration spike this year, up to $85-billion this month.
Questrade CEO Edward Kholodenko said in an e-mail the company’s rapid growth is a result of trading volume increasing 350 per cent year-over-year.
And similar to Wealthsimple, the company is hoping to expand its services into the online banking sector. It is currently in the final stages of obtaining a banking licence in Canada. (Mobile banking provider Koho Financial Inc. has also applied for a Schedule 1 banking licence.)
Unlike its competitors, Wealthsimple has taken a different route.
Wealthsimple is majority owned by various affiliates of Power Corp. of Canada POW-T and serves about three million clients. The company’s surge in business has prompted Power Corp. to increase the value of its stake this year and last, after steeply devaluing its holding in the company in prior years following a crash in tech valuations.
As of June 30, Power Corp. – along with its affiliates – valued its 54.2-per-cent stake in the company at $2.7-billion – more than its peak valuation during the pandemic tech bubble.
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Initially known as an early “robo-adviser,” Wealthsimple entered the industry in 2014 as a disrupter to financial services companies by offering algorithms that could calculate risk profiles for do-it-yourself investors.
In 2018, it launched a savings account in partnership with Equitable Bank. Since then, Wealthsimple has partnered with multiple Schedule 1 banks to hold client deposits in trust. It is therefore not required to have a banking licence.
The company later expanded to offer digital stock trading, cryptocurrency trading, tax filing services and mortgage products. And this summer, it boosted its banking services with an upgrade to its zero-fee chequing account, an unlimited cashback credit card, a secured line of credit, home cash delivery, paperless cheques, bank drafts and wire transfers.
Wealthsimple co-founder and chief product officer Brett Huneycutt said most of the new banking services have rolled out, although the most sought-after product – the company’s first credit card – has been issued to just a small group of clients and is still working through testing. He expects it to be available to all its clients shortly.
On Wednesday, the company announced several upgrades to its investing platform such as access to low-interest RRSP loans, investment portfolios that include exposure to private markets, fractional ownership of physically backed gold, direct indexing and more advanced options-trading strategies, such as secured puts, diagonal spreads, and credit and debit spreads. The trading platform will also cut commissions on options trading to zero.
One new feature that links back to Wealthsimple’s early days of providing lower-fee investing is a mutual fund exchange. Clients will be able to move over mutual fund accounts from other financial institutions – that typically charge management fees between 1 per cent to 2.5 per cent – and reinvest them in ETF portfolios with similar market exposure but lower fees of about 0.4 per cent. (Individual stocks will be offered at a later date.)
Wealthsimple will cover the transfer fees and facilitate the move, which is often comes with a lot of friction for clients.
“We are trying to bring awareness to the market that there’s more than $2-trillion in mutual funds and while they were an amazing invention a couple of decades ago, there’s much better options in the market at much lower costs,” Mr. Huneycutt said.
With a report from Sean Silcoff
