Wealth Management Companies in Canada 2026

When I first wrote about the best financial advisors in Canada it got some attention from Canada’s wealth management companies due to the news and social media attention it received.

If you’re not sure what exactly the difference is between a wealth management firm and a financial planning company – don’t worry – there isn’t one.

The terms “financial planning,” “financial advisor,” and “wealth management,” are all vague terms with little legal meaning in Canada. You could toss “asset management,” “money coaches,” and many other titles into that nebulous category as well.

Most Canadian wealth management firms would have one of two reactions if you asked them what the difference was between financial planning and wealth management.

1) They would mumble some vague financial terms and not really have any answer at all.

2) They would explain that their wealth management company dealt with “high net worth clients”. In other words, folks with over a millions bucks in investable assets. By making an exclusive tier, with an exclusive-sounding name, it can make clients feel special. The marketing team at these big wealth managers might say something like, “Financial planning is for the average Canadian’s day-to-day needs, but wealth management is about building a bespoke future for high net worth individuals.”

What Is Wealth Management?

As I described above, wealth management is a term most often used to describe financial planning for people that range from being well-off to wealthy. It is synonymous with terms like “private wealth management” and “high-net-worth planning”. Often it will be combined with terms like “asset” and “tax optimization.”

All of those words are just marketing jargon to describe good financial planning. Good financial planning for people with a million dollars or more can be a bit more complex than good financial planning for people with less than a million – but the principles are pretty darn similar at the end of the day.

A good wealth management advisor should be thoroughly covering areas such as:

• How they are getting paid
• Your insurance needs
• Estate planning 
• Retirement income strategies
• Tax planning
• Investment education (if needed)
• Optimized accumulation in registered and non-registered accounts
• Planning for drawdown of registered and non-registered
• Budgeting priorities

Our Recommended Private Wealth Advisors

Jason Heath, CFP

• Fee-only, advice-only planner
• Recognized financial expert across many Canadian publications
• 20+ Years of financial planning experience
• Founder of Objective Financial Partners
• Certified Financial Planner (CFP)

Ideal Clients: Canadian investors, executives, professionals, Canadians living abroad (expats), and retirees.

Focus: Comprehensive financial and retirement planning, personalized tax preparation, estate planning, Canadian expatriate financial plans, investment strategies, and insurance needs analysis.

Get in Touch With Jason

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Nancy Grouni, CFP, RRC

• Fee-only, advice-only planner
• Registered Retirement Consultant (RRC)
• Certified Financial Planner (CFP)
• 20+ Years of financial planning experience
• Part of Objective Financial Partners’ team

Ideal Clients: Canada small business owners, retirees with investment holding companies, high net worth individuals, medical and legal professionals.

Focus: Strategic financial and tax planning for business owners.  Estate planning for those with non-registered accounts and holding companies.  Complex financial tactics for high net worth individuals.

Get in Touch With Nancy

Best Wealth Management Companies in Canada

As FT wrote in his Edward Jones review, there is a massive gap when it comes to the large Canadian wealth management companies (that charge massive fees to fuel their massive ad budgets) and a fee-only, advice-only financial planner.

The inherent issue with a wealth management company charging you through commissions on the products it sells, is not unique to Edward Jones though. (They’re just the largest in Canada.)

Some of the other biggest Canadian wealth management companies are:

• Raymond James
• Investors Group (IG Wealth Management)
• RBC Wealth Management
• BMO Nesbitt Burns
• CIBC Wood Gundy
• TD Private Wealth Management
• ScotiaMcleod
• IA Private Wealth
• CI Financial (Assante Wealth Management)
• Wellington-Altus 
• National Bank Financial Wealth Management
• CG Wealth Management
• Nicola Wealth
• Manulife Securities
• Richardson Wealth
• Harbourfront Wealth Management

While there are small differences between these companies, their commission-based models are quite similar. The bottom line is that their advisors make money by selling products to you – and much of the money they make is by taking an annual percentage out of your entire portfolio (leading to much-reduced long-term wealth).

Choosing the Right Wealth Management Company for You

If you’re looking for personalized help in getting the most out of your financial situation then I recommend not being swayed by a bunch of fancy marketing ideas and impressive-looking acronyms behind names.  To be honest with you, none of that means much of anything.

The four questions to answer in order to guarantee the best financial planning help – whether that’s called plain old financial advising, financial planning, wealth management, high net worth planning, private wealth, or any other moniker – are:

• Are the individuals involved fee-only and advice-only financial planners? 
• Does the wealth management company embrace a fiduciary duty towards clients?
• Are the advisors willing to fully explain their fees in easy-to-understand terms?
• Does the company and advisors recommend high-MER mutual funds?

Make sure to do your due diligence before making your final choice of who to work with.  We’re not talking about selecting a personal shopper here, we’re talking about empowering someone to guide your entire financial well-being!

I should note that a common mistake I often see people make when it comes to selecting a wealth manager is to be swayed by how “nice” someone is.  Look, working with nice people is a pleasant experience – definitely better than not nice!  But always keep in mind that if someone gets paid based on the products that you buy and the amount of money that you invest with them, then they are a salesperson first and foremost.  

Successful salespeople are always really good at making personal connections and being nice – that’s like the first day of Sales 101!  

Your financial success will not be determined by fun small talk that makes you feel like you’ve made a friend.  It will be determined by your ability to listen to impartial expert advice – and then implementing that advice.  It quickly boils down to basic psychology and math.  So then, it’s vitally important to work with someone that helps you tilt that psychology and math in your favour – not someone who is going to reach into your investment account each year and take a bunch of your money.

How Do Wealth Management Firms Make Money?

Most Canadian wealth management firms make their money in one of three distinct ways. Pay attention to the details matter a lot (like tens of thousands of dollars per year “a lot”). How an advisor gets paid often shapes the advice you receive. Firms like Objective Financial, IG Wealth Management, RBC Wealth Management, Raymond James, Edward Jones, and others all call themselves “Wealth Management Companies” – but they get paid in drastically different ways! 

Fee-Only, Advice-Only Planning: This is the most simple setup. You pay a clearly-stated dollar amount for advice. No percentages. No commissions. No product sales baked into the recommendation.

It works much like hiring an accountant or a lawyer. You agree on what is needed, you get a quote, and you pay for the work. If you want a financial plan, you will pay exactly one time for that financial plan. If you want ongoing help, you pay a known fee for each additional meeting or annual review. Because compensation is not tied to products or portfolio size, this model avoids all built-in conflicts.

Percentage of Assets Under Management (AUM): Under an assets-under-management (AUM) model, the firm charges a fixed percentage of the portfolio they manage for you each year – usually it’s around 1%. On the surface, the appeal is obvious. As your portfolio grows, the advisor’s compensation grows too. In theory, that aligns incentives and encourages long-term thinking rather than one-off transactions.

It’s also fair to say that the AUM model takes away the incentive to recommend specific investments over others. You can go with low-fee ETFs vs high-fee mutual funds, because you get paid the same either way as an advisor.

The problem is that even small percentages compound quickly, especially over decades. One percent of a million dollars is $10k – and that gets paid every single year no matter if you needed help that year or not. More importantly, this model (while better than the commission-based model we’ll get to right away) can quietly influence advice. Adding money to your portfolio increases the advisor’s compensation. Paying down debt or spending your own savings does not. That doesn’t mean the advice is always wrong, but it does create incentives worth paying attention to.

Commission-Based Wealth Management: This is still the most common model in Canada, and it’s also by far the worst.

A more accurate name for this style of “Wealth Management” would be: kickbacks-for-selling-financial-products wealth management.

With this model, advisors that work for wealth management companies earn money by selling financial products like mutual funds and insurance policies. The fees are often buried inside the product itself and deducted automatically (which makes them easy to ignore and hard to understand). Over time, those embedded costs can take a serious bite out of returns, especially when combined with Canada’s already high management expense ratios. The combined fees under this wealth management model can climb as high as 3%+ – and again – that’s paid every single year. 

Due to probably being the least profitable business to run, the most transparent wealth management option is also the most rare. Fee-only, advice-only planning remains relatively scarce, even though commission-based structures often cost investors far more over the long run. Those costs are frequently disguised through layers of product fees that never show up as a line item on a bill.

One final warning: If a financial professional ever tells you their advice is “free,” or that the investment company pays them so it doesn’t cost you anything, take that as a flashing red light. 

Run (don’t walk) away from these types of wealth management firms!

Red Flags When Choosing a Wealth Manager

Over the past few years I’ve had a few folks ask me some variation of the question, “How could I have known in advance that this advisor wasn’t going to be a good fit?” (This was usually asked at the end of a painful story about bad advice or outright fraudulent malpractice.)

Here’s a quick, non-exhaustive list of common red flags that I’d use to immediately eliminate any wealth manager that wanted to work with me. (Yes, just one of these would be enough to cross them off my personal list.)

1) They can’t explain how they get paid in simple terms (and in less than 60 seconds).

2) At least some part of how they get paid depends on the investments you choose, or the insurance you buy.

3) They tell you that a major part of the value that they bring to the table is selecting investments on your behalf. Any talk of “beating the market” also falls into this bucket.

4) They recommend investing your money in Canadian mutual funds.

5) They leave you with unanswered questions because you felt awkward about following up and asking them to further explain something.

6) They mention “infinite banking” or “borrowing from your own life insurance policy”. (This is just a well-crafted sales pitch meant to get you to buy an insurance product that has a huge kickback for them.)

7) The goal should be to make your life, and the path to your goals more simple – not more complex. Any jargon or lack of explanation that moves you away from this ideal is a bad sign!

8) They have a hard time explaining basic Canadian personal finance concepts such as: “RRSP, TFSA, or FHSA this year?” If they seem hesitant about being able to explain tax situations and always seem to push the conversation towards investing – that’s a red flag.

9) They do not have a fiduciary standard of care to clients.

10) They can’t explain why passive investing is a great idea, and the role MER fees play in choosing investments.

11) They fail to ask a lot of questions in your first planning session. Wealth management should be about listening as much as it is about informing! Too much talk about how great they are and all the great things they can do for you is a red flag. Personal finance is personal!

Wealth Management for Canadian Corporations

Wealth management looks very different once a corporation enters the picture. The moment you’re earning income inside a company, the usual personal finance rules stop being sufficient. You’re no longer just deciding how to invest. You’re deciding when to keep money in your corporation versus when to bring it over to your personal accounts, when it should be taxed, and how to structure everything for optimized retirement savings.

This is where Canadians who own small businesses get tripped up. They might have a solid investment portfolio, but no clear strategy for retained earnings, salary versus dividends, corporate investing, or long-term exit planning. Accountants are great for knowing about specific tax breaks that can be applied in a given year – but they rarely understand the full scope of not only the corporate tax preparation when it meets up with your personal tax situation over the long term. The best wealth management companies combine both small business tax advice, together with personalized financial planning. Decisions around retained corporate earnings, passive income limits, and compensation strategies need to be made with the full picture in mind.

A good corporate wealth plan also looks forward. Not just to next year’s tax bill, but to retirement, succession, and eventual sale or wind-down of the business. Many owners invest corporate money without thinking through how they’ll eventually turn that pool of capital into personal income. That’s how you end up asset-rich on paper but short on flexibility when you actually want to slow down.

This is where firms like Objective Financial tend to be a strong fit for incorporated Canadians. Their approach is planning-first, not product-driven. Because they work alongside corporate accountants, investment decisions are aligned with tax strategy from day one. Questions like whether money should stay inside the corporation, be flowed out personally, or be structured through RRSPs, IPPs, or holding companies are evaluated together, not in isolation.

For business owners, that coordination is often where the real value shows up. It’s not about chasing returns or clever overseas tax structures. It’s about legally reducing lifetime taxes owing, preserving flexibility, and avoiding costly mistakes that compound over decades. When corporate wealth management is done properly, the investment portfolio itself often looks refreshingly boring. 

Canadian Wealth Management FAQ