Wealthsimple, Open Banking and the Fight to Loosen Canada’s Banking Oligopoly

Canada has produced a fintech worth C$10 billion without ever giving fintechs the plumbing that made them possible elsewhere. Wealthsimple, founded in 2014 by Michael Katchen as a robo-adviser, has become a full-service financial platform with C$155.6 billion of assets under administration, 3.6 million clients, a credit card, chequing accounts, crypto trading and SWIFT membership, and it did so while Canada’s open banking framework was postponed from 2023 to 2024 to 2026 and the Real-Time Rail payments system slipped by more than five years. The Big Six banks, which jointly own the Interac network and dominate every channel a challenger needs, have had every incentive to slow the process. This article explains Wealthsimple’s rise, the Power Corporation ownership behind it, the state of the consumer-driven banking framework and payments modernisation in October 2026, and what Koho, Neo and EQB tell us about whether the oligopoly can really be loosened. It is part of the Canada Company Stories hub.

How did Wealthsimple grow from a robo-adviser into a C$10 billion platform?

Wealthsimple grew by adding a new product line roughly every eighteen months and by pricing each one below the banks. Michael Katchen, Rudy Adler and Brett Huneycutt founded the company in Toronto in September 2014 with C$1.9 million of seed money and a simple proposition: low-cost, automated ETF portfolios for people the banks’ advisers ignored. Power Financial invested C$10 million in April 2015, the start of a relationship that would make Power Corporation the controlling shareholder.

Growth was steady rather than explosive until 2019, when the company launched zero-commission stock trading through Wealthsimple Trade and acquired SimpleTax, later rebranded Wealthsimple Tax. The pandemic trading boom then transformed the business: clients rose from 500,000 at the end of 2020 to 1.6 million a year later, assets went from C$9.7 billion to C$18.8 billion, and in May 2021 the company raised C$750 million at a C$5 billion valuation from Meritech, Greylock and others. The 2022 market downturn stalled growth and forced layoffs, but the company used the period to build a broader product suite: a cash account that became a full chequing product, crypto trading with self-custody transfers, mortgages through partners, and in June 2025 its first credit card, a Visa Infinite with cash-back in investable assets.

The results since have been extraordinary. Assets under administration doubled in 2024 to C$64 billion, doubled again to C$111 billion by the end of 2025 and reached C$155.6 billion at 30 June 2026, with C$17 billion of net flows in the second quarter alone driven by chequing and spending products. The company passed its five-year target of C$100 billion in October 2025, three years early, and now talks publicly about C$1 trillion by 2034. Clients reached 3.2 million at the end of 2025 and 3.6 million by mid-2026. Wealthsimple also became the first Canadian fintech to join the SWIFT network, launched prediction markets after regulatory approval, and struck a partnership with X to let Canadian users trade from stock tickers in posts.

Who owns Wealthsimple and what is it worth?

Wealthsimple is majority-owned by the Power Corporation group, which held a 52.3 per cent undiluted stake, or 40.7 per cent fully diluted, at 30 June 2026 through Power Financial, IGM Financial and the Portage Ventures fund run by Power’s private-markets arm Sagard. The relationship gives Wealthsimple a patient controlling shareholder with deep financial-services experience, and gives Power a growth asset that has become one of the largest contributors to its net asset value.

The October 2025 funding round set the current valuation. Wealthsimple raised up to C$750 million at a C$10 billion post-money valuation, roughly C$550 million of primary capital and up to C$200 million of secondary sales, co-led by existing investor Dragoneer Investment Group and new investor GIC, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, with CPP Investments joining as a new investor alongside Power Corporation, IGM, ICONIQ, Greylock and Meritech. The valuation was double the C$5 billion of 2021 and came with the company describing itself as profitable, though it does not disclose revenue or profit.

Power’s own accounts show the mark-to-market effect. Its share of Wealthsimple was valued at C$2.1 billion at the end of 2024, C$3.8 billion at the end of 2025 and C$4.7 billion at 30 June 2026, up 15 per cent in a single quarter. Sagard’s separate interest was valued at C$4.4 billion. That revaluation is one of the main reasons Power’s adjusted net asset value per share rose from C$60.44 to C$112.94 between December 2024 and June 2026, a story the Desmarais family profile explores. The ownership also creates an irony: Canada’s leading bank challenger is controlled by the same group that owns Great-West Lifeco and IGM, two of the incumbents it competes with, as the insurers’ story explains.

Why does Canada not yet have open banking?

Canada does not yet have open banking because the process has been consultative, cautious and repeatedly reset by political change. The federal government appointed an advisory committee in 2018, received a final report from it in 2021 recommending a hybrid industry-government model, appointed Abraham Tachjian as open banking lead in 2022, and promised a launch in 2023. That date slipped to 2024, then to 2025, then to 2026 in the 2024 Fall Economic Statement.

Legislation finally arrived in two stages. Budget 2024 enacted the Consumer-Driven Banking Act, giving the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada (FCAC) oversight and creating the accreditation framework. Then the November 2025 budget, the first under Mark Carney, moved oversight from the FCAC to the Bank of Canada, which already supervises close to 1,500 payment service providers under the Retail Payment Activities Act, and committed to complete the Act, add a data-mobility right under federal privacy law, and legislate payment initiation and write access by mid-2027 once the Real-Time Rail was live. The Bank of Canada was allowed to retain up to C$19.3 million over two years to build its supervision function.

On 27 June 2026 the Department of Finance published draft regulations in the Canada Gazette for a 60-day consultation. They would require banks and other institutions to share, on a customer’s request, account numbers, product terms and fees, balances and transaction data, and they extend beyond deposit accounts to payment, investment and lending products, a scope Tachjian, now at Brim Financial, described as justifying the term open finance. Registered payment service providers such as Wealthsimple, Koho and Venn would get a streamlined accreditation stream; the sponsored-accreditation model that industry group FDATA had pushed, under which large firms would take responsibility for smaller ones, was not adopted. Some requirements would take effect within a year of the final regulations being published, which puts the practical launch in 2027.

Why do the Big Six banks have so much power over the plumbing?

The banks control the plumbing because they built it. Interac, the network that runs Canada’s debit system and the e-Transfer service used for most person-to-person payments, was founded in 1984 by RBC, CIBC, Scotiabank, TD and Desjardins as a non-profit cooperative and became a for-profit corporation in 2018 after earlier attempts were blocked by the Competition Bureau. Its shareholders are still the banks and other large financial institutions. Payments Canada, which runs the clearing systems, was until 2025 a membership organisation effectively limited to banks, and the Automated Clearing Settlement System that moves most retail money still settles overnight in batches.

That structure matters to fintechs in three ways. First, access: a challenger that wants to offer e-Transfer or move money into client accounts has historically had to go through a bank sponsor, pay bank-set fees and accept bank-set limits. Wealthsimple only joined Interac e-Transfer as a direct participant in September 2023. Second, cost: per-transaction e-Transfer pricing was set in ways that favoured high-volume incumbents; Interac said in 2025 it would move to a flatter volume-based structure that lowers costs for smaller participants. Third, data: without open banking, fintechs have relied on screen-scraping, where customers hand over bank passwords to a third party, which banks have discouraged and which the draft regulations are expected to phase out.

The 2025 payments reforms began to change this. On 25 September 2025 Payments Canada opened membership to new firms seeking direct access to core systems, and the Bank of Canada’s supervision of payment service providers under the Retail Payment Activities Act came into force the same month, giving fintechs a regulatory status that banks could no longer dismiss. The Real-Time Rail, Canada’s long-delayed instant-payment system built by Interac with IBM and CGI as technology partners, is scheduled to launch in 2026 after a timeline that originally targeted 2022; Payments Canada’s own research shows Canadians made more than C$12 trillion of payments in 2025 and that more than half are interested in real-time payments. Write access under open banking, which would let an app move money or switch accounts on a customer’s behalf, is explicitly sequenced after the Real-Time Rail is in widespread use.

What are Koho, Neo and the bank-licence challengers doing?

Koho, Neo and EQB represent three different routes to the same goal: becoming a bank, or something that functions like one, without being one of the Big Six. Koho, founded in Vancouver and led by Daniel Eberhard, started as a prepaid-card spending account in 2017 and now offers chequing, savings, credit-building, a line of credit and, from late 2024, travel benefits. In June 2026 it closed a C$130 million all-primary Series E at a C$1.33 billion post-money valuation, with new investors including Mubadala, Savano Capital, Shopify founder Tobi Lütke and Affirm’s Michael Linford alongside existing backers Portage, BDC Capital, HOOPP, Drive Capital and Eldridge. The company reported more than 2.5 million clients, about C$250 million of annual revenue growing 50 per cent, and said it was in the final stages of obtaining a federal Schedule I bank licence, a process it began about five years earlier. Questrade, the online brokerage, received its bank licence in 2025 after a six-year process, which suggests the regulator is willing to let challengers in but at a pace of its own choosing.

Neo Financial, founded in Calgary in 2019 by former SkipTheDishes executives Andrew Chau, Jeff Adamson, Kris Read and Chris Simair, has taken the partnership route: its credit cards, savings, mortgages and investment accounts are provided through partner banks and dealers, with deposits held at Peoples Bank of Canada. It raised a C$360 million Series D in November 2024 that included Tencent, an investment that drew national-security scrutiny, taking total funding past C$600 million, and it has built a merchant-rewards network of more than 11,000 partners plus co-branded cards such as a United MileagePlus card announced in 2026.

EQB is the incumbent challenger. The parent of Equitable Bank, Canada’s seventh-largest bank by assets, announced on 3 December 2025 that it would acquire PC Financial, the banking arm of grocer Loblaw with access to its 18 million PC Optimum members, and completed the deal on 1 July 2026 after Competition Bureau clearance in March and ministerial approval in May. Galen G. Weston and Loblaw’s Richard Dufresne joined EQB’s board, and chief executive Chadwick Westlake said the acquisition structurally shifted the bank’s customer reach. The first quarter including PC Financial, to 31 July 2026, showed revenue up 28 per cent to C$391 million but a reported loss as integration costs hit. The Loblaw story covers the Weston side of that transaction.

Sources: company announcements and reporting by BetaKit, Newswire and Power Corporation, 2025-26.

What has Ottawa done to curb bank fees and switching costs?

Beyond open banking, the federal government has used Budget 2025 to attack the retail fees and friction that protect the incumbents. It capped non-sufficient-funds fees at C$10 from March 2026, following a 2024 agreement with the Big Six on low-cost accounts at up to C$4 a month, and promised draft regulations by spring 2026 to ban the transfer fees, averaging about C$150 per account, that banks charge when customers move investment or registered accounts to a rival. That last measure matters directly to Wealthsimple, which has offered to reimburse transfer fees as a customer-acquisition tool for years.

The budget also asked the FCAC to report on the structure and transparency of bank fees, committed to work with banks on simplifying the switching of primary chequing accounts, proposed raising the threshold at which a bank must be widely held from C$2 billion to C$4 billion of equity to help credit unions and challengers grow, and promised a stablecoin regime under the Retail Payment Activities Act. Taken together with the Real-Time Rail and open banking, the package amounts to the most serious attempt in a generation to lower the cost of competing with the Big Six.

Whether it works depends on sequencing. Open banking without instant payments gives challengers data but not money movement; instant payments without open banking give them rails but not the customer relationship. Ottawa’s plan links the two, with write access following the Real-Time Rail, which is why the 2026 launch date for the Rail is the single most important milestone for the sector.

What are the risks to Wealthsimple and the open banking project?

There is a structural tension in the ownership, too. Power Corporation’s control gives Wealthsimple stability, but the group’s other holdings, IGM’s adviser-led wealth businesses and Great-West Lifeco’s insurance products, compete with what Wealthsimple sells, and an IPO, which the company says it still intends to pursue eventually, would force that relationship to be defined. The Shopify story shows how differently a widely held Canadian technology company behaves once public.

What can founders and investors learn from Wealthsimple and Canada’s fintech fight?

The first lesson is that a challenger can win customers before the infrastructure arrives if it picks products where the incumbents are weakest. Wealthsimple did not wait for open banking; it attacked fees in investing, then trading, then foreign exchange and cash, each time in a product where the Big Six were least able to respond without cannibalising their own margins. By the time open banking arrives it will have 3.6 million clients to connect.

The second lesson is about patient, aligned ownership. Power Corporation’s willingness to fund Wealthsimple through the 2022 downturn, when other fintechs were cutting or selling, allowed the company to launch the products that drove the 2024-26 surge. Founders should weigh the trade-off between a strategic majority owner and a cleaner cap table carefully, because the former provides capital in bad years and the latter provides freedom in good ones.

The third lesson is that regulatory timelines in Canada should be planned around, not relied upon. Open banking was promised for 2023 and will not practically arrive before 2027; the Real-Time Rail was promised for 2022. Companies that built business plans on those dates, including several small-business lenders and accounting fintechs, were hurt. Those that treated the delays as a competitive moat for incumbents and built around them, as Wealthsimple, Koho and Neo did, are the ones raising capital in 2026. Readers comparing jurisdictions will find the UK’s experience, covered in the UK Company Stories hub, instructive: open banking there was mandated in 2018 and the challenger banks that benefited most were the ones already at scale when it arrived.

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