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Email this10:57 am
December 12, 2009
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Wealthsimple recently shared that its assets under administration have now surpassed $100 billion, which is up 100% over 2024's $50 billion in AUA and 2025 isn't even finished. While it doesn't break down the AUA by asset type, $40-60 billion are assumed to be in its Wealthsimple Cash and Save deposit products (held in Wealthsimple Investments, Inc.-managed pooled trust deposit accounts at several CDIC member institutions), with the balance in Stocks & ETFs, Invest, and Crypto accounts.
That puts them on part with EQB Inc. in terms of AUA and they have now lapped, several times, Home Trust / Home Bank.
As part of that announcement, it announced a new equity fundraising round of $750 million, bringing in new private equity (Dragoneer Investment Group) and sovereign wealth funds (Singapore GIC and CPP Investment Board) as new investors. Most, if not all, existing investors, notably controlling shareholder Power Corporation of Canada, participated in the funding round, to at least maintain their equity ownership positions. 
The firm is now valued, fairly conservatively, at $10 billion.
300,000 Canadians now have their premium industry-leading Wealthsimple credit card. While they don't break out the number of Canadians with a Wealthsimple Cash account, it's likely between 750,000-3 million. 3 million use Wealthsimple.
On digital everyday banking, this puts them either narrowly ahead of EQ Bank's Personal Account in terms of total unique customers, significantly ahead of PC Financial's PC Money Account, to possibly ahead of Simplii Financial's 1.5-1.9 million (they never update their total customers anymore, and I believe it's bled customers a bit each year). They may equal or surpass Tangerine Chequing in the next couple of years.
This is why Motive Financial and Motus Bank threw in the towel, and LBC Digital is likely to do the same soon.
Cheers,
Doug
11:15 am
October 27, 2013
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One has to be careful on what one is comparing when they say AUM/AUA.
Do you really know how much the Fairstone Bank group of companies (Fairstone Financial, Home Trust, Home Bank, et al) really have in AUA/AUM? I don't since it is privately held and not everything will be publicly available.
The Equitable Group of companies supposedly currently have about $137B of AUM so size is comparable, but somewhat different in terms of where the assets are deployed.
1:28 pm
December 12, 2009
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AltaRed said
One has to be careful on what one is comparing when they say AUM/AUA.
Yes. AUM can generate more revenue than AUA
Do you really know how much the Fairstone Bank group of companies (Fairstone Financial, Home Trust, Home Bank, et al) really have in AUA/AUM? I don't since it is privately held and not everything will be publicly available.
That's true of Fairstone Financial, Inc., the subsidiary, but thankfully that is mostly just consumer loans and private label credit cards, which wouldn't count as AUA for our purposes. Pre-merger with Duo Bank of Canada, which had ~$1 billion in deposits. Looking at the deposits of Home Bank, we see they have about $6.5 billion, and Fairstone Bank of Canada, has about $22 billion, which seems a bit high (this is as of August 31, 2025, OSFI returns). This suggests they've already effected a block transfer of deposits from Home Trust Company, as I can't load HTC's OSFI financial return. Even if it doesn't, one of the reasons for the go-private transaction was to turn around the Home businesses. Their growth had trailed the CPI and GDP growth rates, and there's no reason to suggest they've been going gangbusters since. I would suggest they've, at best, treaded water. If we assume that and add in another $35-38 billion in deposits, we still don't even get to $70 billion.
Cheers,
Doug
5:33 pm
April 27, 2017
Online
They are not benchmarking themselves against CUs. Wealthsimple CEO in Financial Post:
MK: The big banks do an important job in Canada and they’re not going anywhere anytime soon. However, Wealthsimple is now among the top five institutions in the country for net deposits. Last year, we did about $20 billion or so in net deposits. This year, we’ll do about $40 billion. That probably puts us in the top three. When you think about the share of flows that Wealthsimple is capturing in terms of new money being invested, new investment accounts being opened, we’ve opened 35 per cent of all (First Home Savings Accounts) since the investment account was introduced a couple years ago.
It takes time to bring change, but if you look at where Canadians are choosing to open their next investment account or place their next investment dollar, they are overwhelmingly choosing Wealthsimple and so it’s going to take us some time, but we’re pretty excited about the scale.
6:57 pm
September 28, 2023
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The real test is going to be how much loyalty WS can have. It is easy to gain assets when doing match offers or handing out iPhones or Macs, etc but when those offers dry up how many will stick around?
To their credit, WS doesn't even charge to transfer registered investments out (yet, unlike $150 with practically everyone else) but there will be a point in which Power Corp focuses less on growth and more on income.
8:28 pm
April 27, 2017
Online
Match offers and IPads have been offered by several (most?) other FIs. WS is still growing much faster.
Transfer charges will be banned in 2026 which is going to be a substantial financial benefit to WS vis-a-vis big 5.
I think they designed a nice environment for their customers. Makes it hard to leave once you are hooked. This is the first year clients started using WS as their main chequing/credit account which makes it harder to leave. And they do reward us for sticking around
Also, WS will be adding more services faster as they have just got another cash injection. I think they’ll be fine as long as service standards can be maintained with such fast growth. That’s the main risk, imho. Also, interesting to see if Questrade can provide stronger competition now that they are a bank.
4:06 am
December 20, 2019
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everhopeful said
The real test is going to be how much loyalty WS can have. It is easy to gain assets when doing match offers or handing out iPhones or Macs, etc but when those offers dry up how many will stick around?To their credit, WS doesn't even charge to transfer registered investments out (yet, unlike $150 with practically everyone else) but there will be a point in which Power Corp focuses less on growth and more on income.
It's the features that makes the difference, for instance...
Simplii keeps stripping, no credit card notifications, takes 2 days when you pay Simplii Visa to come out of account. Manual mail in cheque to attach account etc.
WS, everything just works, I pay the Visa and in 2 seconds it's actually paid. I can claim my Visa rewards at any time and deposit to any account. I get a failed notification if someone uses the wrong expiry date charging my card.
The list with WS just keeps going, so yes it's nice to have the perks but the features will keep me there.
WS has slowly become my main bank and I was noting that to myself the other day.
That said I am generational but not confident enough to give them all my money. Smart people will always spread into multiple financial institutions.
5:02 am
March 30, 2017
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mordko said
Match offers and IPads have been offered by several (most?) other FIs. WS is still growing much faster.Transfer charges will be banned in 2026 which is going to be a substantial financial benefit to WS vis-a-vis big 5.
Hi, where u see the new transfer charges being banned for brokerages ?
WS charging zero dollar commission is a big attractive factor for a lot of gen Z etc, which are actively trading / investing very nominal amount.
One area I continue to complain about is the inability to download a copy of the full monthly statement in other format other than pdf...
6:11 am
April 27, 2017
Online
Just google, you’ll find the answer to the transfer charges question.
Zero commission is a thing at Questrade and NB, possibly others. Big banks stopped charging on selected key products. So its not just that. I am Gen X, don’t actively trade and they didn’t get to >100bn in assets by attracting nominal amounts.
How they present their data is one of my major issues with TDDI. I have to go through each of my gazillion accounts individually, and its way too cumbersome each time.
With WS at the end of the month I get everything downloaded to my Google Sheet in the right format with distributions and transactions from all accounts taking their rightful place. And it takes just a few clicks. Took a bit of effort to set it all up but wasn’t particularly difficult either. Questrade lets you see and download transaction data across accounts as well, so its not unique to WS.
Not sure about actual statements, but they certainly let you download all the content in spreadsheet format.
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