Speaker 1: Good afternoon everyone. Thank you for joining us for the Global Mail's Evolution of Wealth Management event. I'm Pablo Fuchs, editor of Globe Advisor here at the Globe Mail, and I'm pleased to be your host and moderator, along with my colleague Diane Gage, who will be on stage in just a few minutes. Before we get started, I would like to acknowledge that the land upon which The Globe and Mail is headquartered, it's a traditional territory of the Wendat the Anishinaabe, eg, the Haudenosaunee, the Matey Nation, and the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nations. We're grateful to have the opportunity to work and live on this land. For those of you in the audience who manage, support and work with advisors, be sure to invite them to register for free to Globe Advisor. It's a Global Mail's dedicated portal that provides in-depth information, analysis, and coverage of the investment investment industry for financial advisors. We cover the topics that matter to them, from investing to regulation to fintech to practice management to financial planning, among many others. On behalf of The Globe Mail, I would like to give a special thanks to Broadridge for making this event possible. And on that note, please welcome to the stage Karen Kirkwood, president of Broadridge Canada.

Speaker 2: Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. What a great conversation we're going to have, and I'm very honored to have you with us. For those of you who don't know me, I am Karen Kirkwood, and I have the honor and privilege to serve as president of Broadridge Canada. For nearly six decades, Broadridge has been serving the Canadian marketplace and providing critical business services across our capital markets, wealth and investor communication businesses. In the wealth management industry, specifically, organizations rely on our technologies, solutions, data and capabilities to drive advisor productivity, personalized client experiences to digitize operations, and of course, to respond to the challenges of our regulatory environment. In short, we help wealth managers get ahead of today's challenges and get ready for what's next. And today, the topic is what's next in wealth management. Our industry, as you all know, is experiencing unprecedented change. And with that, we see tremendous opportunity at its core. Wealth management has always been about providing tailored financial advice and investment services to clients, but the pace of change and technology advancements is accelerating and redefining what it means to be innovative in our market and to be customer centric in our market. From my Lens and Brad lens, business velocity, flexibility, personalization and simplification are key themes and what we see in the market. How to open up our systems and our ecosystems to serve clients across their channel of choice, consistently and with perfection and excellence. Taking friction out of the process and taking manual processes away so we can be more straight through and ensuring resiliency, scalability and cyber safety while we do so. Should I mention responding to regulatory change? That's another example of obviously what's top of mind for all of us. T1, CRM three and zero are examples that will come up in our panel discussion today. Digital transformation is no longer a buzzword. It's a fundamental shift that affects everything that we do and the clients that we support. One of the most interesting, exciting developments in can't talk about digital advancement without generative AI. Generative AI is transforming not just the way we analyze and interpret data, but the way in which we interact with clients and the services we provide along their financial journeys. But what's the right mix of AI and hybrid and in-person personal human interactions, as we provide services to our clients with the power of gen AI, and it comes with that the responsibility to ensure that we are always using data ethically, maintaining privacy, and ensuring that trust is the cornerstone of our relationships. Another area that is top of mind is ensuring that we address today's reality, where half of baby boomers are now at the retirement age. Changing demographics. Succession planning and the great transfer of assets are top of mind and areas for us to have opportunity. My gratitude to the globe and the esteemed group of experts that you'll meet in a moment from across our industry who will share their insights on these topics. And also to Pablo and Diane, who from The Globe and Mail will lead the discussions with our transformative leaders. And most importantly, and I'll end on this note. Thank you again for all of you to take the time out of your busy schedule today. Together, we have the opportunity to shape a future that is more dynamic, resilient, and client centric. So let's get started. Diana, over to you. Thank you Karen and hello everyone. I'm Deanne Gage, reporter with Globe advisor at the Globe and Mail. I've been covering issues to do with wealth management and advisors for much of my career, and I'm really delighted to host this first session. So to help lay out some of the bigger trends in wealth management in the States and Canada, I'm delighted to be interviewing Charles Smith, partner in Wealth and Asset Management consulting with Y in New York. Charles has more than 25 years of experience in the financial services sector. He leads strategic projects focused on improving the client and wealth advisor experience. Welcome, Charles.

Speaker 3 : Thank you. It's great to be here.

Speaker 2 : So I'd like to start by asking how wealth management has changed in the last decades in the U.S. and what that means for Canada.

Speaker 3 : Sure. I don't have enough time to go through all the different changes, but, we've seen quite a bit of activity as it's already referenced. The market's accelerated tremendously with technology and the impact that Covid had on everyone, and the focus that investors have on doing research on their own, doing more self-directed activities. But I think generally, we see both of you as a kind of Canadian market. Actually, I think I've always heard Kmart gets further behind the US. I don't think it's really that much farther behind anymore. I think truly caught up. There are few firms. The U.S. have kind of move forward. I think ahead of both U.S. and Canadian, firms. But I think, you know, the trends we've seen have been digital first. But obviously digital transformation is now table stakes. And the fact that mobile first, especially for the younger generations, is definitely critical and paramount need to have a mobile first strategy to interact with younger investors. That's where they want to interact with their providers. So having that strategy is definitely important that we're seeing a big push as well towards creating an advisor focused strategy around technology and platforms, right? I think a lot of firms realized, that robo advice wasn't really going to work. Firms tried it, built it, really get very far. And they really realize that the advisor and having advisor led relationship is going to be important for both older and younger generations going forward. We also have this part of Covid, I reemergence of self-directed trading, of investors getting more involved with their wealth, with their management, doing more trading on their own. And the US, we saw the rise and the stability now of Robinhood being, a driver of self-directed in a lot of firms in the US. You know, Schwab, fidelity, Morgan Stanley of all followed. So I think that's to be a big part of wealth going forward is having the ability to kind of balance being self-directed trading and advice and providing different a full service experience. Also, we've seen a lot more focus on financial planning, a lot more tools that have given advisors the ability, kind of work with the clients, understand their needs, plan for their goals. I think, you know, we've seen a couple of tools like conquest wealth, rise up here in Canada being a really, you know, unique tool that works very well with wealth kind of advisors. So I think we've seen quite a bit. I think, you know, the difference really, in the US is that there are a lot more regional, smaller players. Rias. I really pushing the envelope, trying different things and pushing some of the bigger firms to invest very heavily in some of their tools to make sure they maintain that, that lead that they have over the, the smaller players.

Speaker 2 : And, would you say Canada's moving at a bit of a slower pace behind a little bit.

Speaker 3 : But I think, you know, I think it's kind of with technology, it's kind of level playing a little bit is a little bit behind. But I think, technology allows you to, to catch up and be accelerates. Not as much about, labor and hands on keyboards as much as using technology to improve the, the overall advisor and client experience.

Speaker 2 : And are there any lessons that Canada can take from the US since we're a bit.

Speaker 3 : Sure.
Speaker 2 :A little bit.

Speaker 3 : Behind? I think they're probably I think two one is definitely the fact that technology cannot replace the advisor. But I think robo advice, as I mentioned before, really didn't didn't really succeed. I think there's a place for technology and there's a place for AI and for, you know, technology related advice. But I think it's I think the advisor needs to still be front and center, with his or her client. The other is I think most firms have succeeded, have done really well with managing their data. The firms that I think struggled, in terms of adding different product services and giving the full the full experience of the wealth firm are the ones that didn't have a good management of their client data, their account data, in the product data. So I think those are things that we've seen. Firms who have succeeded to push the envelope are the ones that have really good grasp on that foundational level of managing, having a clear data strategy and building on top of that with both platforms capabilities and ultimately using tools like AI to kind of, enhance the experience for for advisors.

Speaker 2 :Okay. And let's talk digital tools. How are firms making advisors more productive? It seems to me there might be, a bit of a learning curve and maybe some reluctance amongst people who don't have that experience or do naturally gravitate to it.

Speaker 3 :Yeah, there's a couple of things I think that firms are doing. One is definitely automating and digitizing the experience. So when it comes to onboarding or reporting, being able to use digital tools to kind of streamline the the book, the workflow internally as well as the experience for advisors. So giving them the ability to onboard more quickly, have less time back and forth on paper based activities and pushing a lot more of the activity to the middle and back office. So the advisors are doing less, in the in the front office and doing more with the client. Right. Being out in front and center with the client producing, you know, more insights and activity with the client, spending more time with them, understand them better. And the other thing too, we've seen in the US is a emergence of this centralized investment management capability. So a lot of firms us have taken away or at least tried to, to mitigate or minimize the advisors ability to trade and be a portfolio manager for that client and really create a centralized management of of assets or fee based assets. I think the rise of what's called a, unified managed account and multi sleeve managed product that allows, a firm to take multiple products together into one single account. The station has been. A leader in the US, firms have really pushed a lot of their fee based product into this multi sleeve strategy and allow a Home Office team to manage that. So that gives the advisor more time to spend with their client.

Speaker 2 : Right. I obviously is going to play a huge role in wealth management. How are you going to handle reluctance there. Not just that. Maybe the firm and advisor level, but you know consumers quite frankly.

Speaker 3 : And we're seeing a, you know, in some of these operational activities take, take, take root. Now I think primarily, where it's starting. And you're right, there's definitely some, some fear. I think we've seen a lot of hallucinations and some issues and, you know, some stories coming out. I think we're we're seeing it happen really is more in the middle and back office to start because it kind of gives removes some of the risk of having your errors, you know, visible with the advisor visit with the client. So we're seeing, you know, use cases where they're helping out with reconciliation, helping out with onboarding, looking for anomalies. So more middle of the back office, I think eventually you'll start to see we have a few firms working on this now where they push some of that. I have a capability into the support model. So have you have a call coming to your support team and then you have questions come in from the client and the I can listen in and come up with solutions as you were speaking to the client. So it's not really going directly to the client, but he's giving the support personnel some, some opportunity to kind of get some insight without having to go and do the research on their own. I think ultimately you'll see use cases where, advisors start to use it to provide more insights on the client as they, as a client calls an advisor the same thing. When that starts to happen, they're getting insights on the client, on their their behaviors or background, their demographics. So the advisors more insights when they're talking to a client. I think I think what firms have to do is one, they have to have transparency, right. When using AI, let people know you're using it, right. At least at least now. So they're aware that AI's been as part of the experience. I think also, there should be a lot of governance around making sure they're using it properly. Right? There's lots of opportunity out there to use AI in a in an improper way. So make sure you have the right governance model in your firm to kind of manage that whole AI development process with it is tricky. So I think a lot of firms are finding is when they go and build an AI tool, you know, testing is is almost impossible in a lot of ways because the normal, you know, traditional technology build, you have a set of rules instead of test cases. You test them all. For the most part, you're you're covered. But in a model, if you if you're training a model to do certain things, you give it a certain set of cases. It only knows what it's been taught. So if you get something that's brand new I've never seen before, it's not going to. It may not know how to answer it. So there's that risk out there that, you know, you don't have the right proper testing in place. And you set aside enough time to kind of test all the as many use cases as possible. There's some risk involved there. So there's some issues. But I think about being transparent about it, having a good governance model and having a team that's really focused on testing properly and training your models properly is going to be a big piece of using AI going forward. So there's a lot of talk about AI saving money and being reducing labor, and that's definitely true. But a lot is going to shift over to the testing building. And you're running the models that you're using for for your business.

Speaker 2 What do you do though, if clients are sort of, saying that they're reluctant, they don't want it being used by the advisors in the practice there. There's been a recent study that sort of showed that more than half of Canadians don't want their advisor.

Speaker 3 :Yeah, that's a good that's a good point. There are some I think some folks are definitely a little gun shy with using AI. I think you have to give the advisor the capability or the whatever for is using AI to turn it off. Right. So if you maybe becomes one of those situations where you have to climb before you start working with them, hey, do you want to include AI as part of your experience? If they say no, then you should. You have the opportunity to kind of not use it. Go back to your more traditional methods of working with that client.

Speaker 2 : Okay, let's talk demographics now. What, trends do you see with what's happening with just boomers, Gen X, younger generations, we've sort of talked to, we came up earlier about the wealth transfer.

Speaker 3 :Yes. Yeah. There's definitely, I think it's, I think last ISOs, 85 trillion, you know, in the US, US dollars ready to transfer over the next ten, 20 years or so. I think I think with most of the older generation, I think they're probably very comfortable with their provider. Right. If you're with your provider ten, 15 years out with one mine. Now for for our I say close to 15, probably not going to change. It's that younger generation. The millennials are now, you know, getting into the early 40s and the Gen Z that's coming up, that's, you know, probably the 20s and 30s, they really don't know how to handle. So what firms are trying to do is I think what we've seen is a lot of the traditional brands are struggling because if you're, you know, a traditional brand has been in the wealth space for a long time and you're really well established. Bank, the younger generations don't really want to work with the older banks. They want the newer technology. You want digital, they want, you know, an experience that's kind of akin to what they get from their other, you know, from Snapchat and some of the other things they work with. So a lot of firms are trying to combat that by building the right technology. Right? So they have the right digital tools to service that client, that they're creating an experience that allows them to interact very, dynamically with their with their investors. The other thing we're seeing quite a bit of work, being put into a lot of these bigger firms, especially in the high net worth space, is around estate and trust planning. Right? So be able to take the assets that a older generation client has and to protect it, to provide that client the ability to kind of pass those assets down to the next generations. And doing that gives you opportunity, kind of lock those assets into your experience. Right. So the ability to work with a beneficiary in a trust to have the opportunity, kind of get them to know. You as a firm, you can show them what you can do. You're beyond what some of these smaller fintech firms that are popping up. You know that some of these younger generation might gravitate to. So there's some opportunity, I think, for firms to, you know, use different products to retain assets and pass those down to other generations.

Speaker 2 :You know, the transfer has been talked about for about two decades, as long as I've been covering this industry. When do you think we're going to actually see a lot more movement there? And it's going to be where it's like, yes, it's happening. I think it's.

Speaker 3 :I think it's happening now. I think it's been it's gradual. It's not going to happen overnight. It's not going to be you're going to see trillions of dollars move from one generation to the next. I think it's a gradual process, especially you have to state our trust plan put in place. It could be happening as we speak. So you could put in a a trust that allows you to be accessed by the beneficiary but still retained by the guarantor. So I think it's gradually happening. Yeah, we will talk about it forever. It's one of those things that I think you'll see that baby boomers are going to retire all at once, and they're not. They're retiring gradually, though, the assets will flow gradually as well. I think we're starting to see that now.

Speaker 2 : And can you talk a bit about the asset allocation and the changes that are happening, just given the fact all these new, all these new generations are entering into wealth management and whatnot? Yeah.

Speaker 3 :Looks like so I think what we're seeing in terms of asset allocation currently is currently in the past, I say 6 to 9 months or so is a lot of clients take trying to take on more risk. I think we've seen the emergence of private markets and alternative investments in wealth, especially in, in, in the fee based situation. We're seeing, you know, a lot of the wealth managers looking for other ways to, again, attract clients, get them in the door, show them that they really add value beyond what you can do on your own and make some of these unique investments, you know, in in the private markets, you know, internal funds, tender offer funds, things that are a little bit, I'd say a little bit semi liquid. But give the advisor more tools to work with the kind of go to the go to the client, say, you know, hey, we can increase your, your returns a little bit here and there, we can adjust your allocation to give a little bit more opportunity to kind of grow your grow your wealth. We're also seeing in the US quite a bit of annuities, come into play, especially as some of these investors start moving into retirement, getting ready, getting older. They want to, you know, retain a steady paycheck in retirement. So we're seeing a lot more opportunity for annuities and advisory. Couple firms have built out, you know, capabilities for in a multi sleeve environment. We have equities fixed income with an a portion of your your assets are allocated to to an annuity. So that's if I think what we're seeing in the market terms of allocation changes. But I think for the most part, the market have been pretty good with a couple, you know, a couple of blips in there. So people are now feeling more confident that I can take a little more risk. I think we're seeing that come out in some of the allocations and in, well.

Speaker 2 :Do younger generations value personal advice from a human being as opposed to a screen?

Speaker 3 :What we've seen with actually the study UI a couple years ago and, for years, we always thought that millennials, you know, for, you know, who were, you know, the younger generation for a long time didn't want to have access to a person. But the last day we did, we can share it. Binary on our website, shows that millennials are just as needy of advice and, and conversation with people as Boomers and Gen X. So I think that actually what we learned, I think we thought about this a while ago and we assumed it was happening, it's now happening is that as you age, your life becomes more complex, the journey becomes more difficult. Right? How do you navigate through high interest rates, high mortgage rates? How do you balance, savings with investment with, you know, a vacation home. And these younger generations are realizing that they can't do it all online, that they need someone to kind of guide them through the complex conversation around outside education and the US. Definitely tax. I think it can as well. Tax is a very complicated conversation. So that's where an advisor can definitely he or she can jump in and really help a client through some complex, you know, structuring of assets and, planning for retirement planning for different goals is through that conversation with actual live in Visor.

Speaker 2 :And Gen Z. That would be 25.

Speaker 3 :Gen Z is tough. I think they're still very young. They don't have a lot of assets yet, so I think it's early to tell. I think with them it's still about being digital, being innovative, and just be rate of capital assets where they do come in. I think with millennials, it's hard for a while to kind of see where the assets are coming. We thought robo advice would be it, but it wasn't safe for Gen Z. It's really early to tell. But I would just say just be on top. You know, I think with with digital strategy and with platform transformation, it's a continuous process. You can't rebuild your advisor desktop and your client portal on your mobile app and be like, okay, I'm done. That's that's the end. You're not you really have to start replanning the next set of capabilities, next design. Realize you released your next version. So it's really an ongoing process. And talking to and surveying that younger generation is important to learn about what their needs are. I think it's still very much up in the air from my perspective.

Speaker 2 : Okay. Let's talk about the different pillars of wealth management. You know, private banking and investments. You have insurance. Like, how is this all going to work? Like, integration, the convergence of everything with everyone talking to each other?

Speaker 3 : Yeah. So I think, you know, it's difficult, right? When you have these are different business lines, different platforms. I certainly I've never talked to each other. Right. You've had banking, insurance lending, investments all running and running in a lot of firms separately in the same in Canada, in the U.S, right. In the U.S it's a lot of broker dealers leading the way with some banking they're trying to integrate in Canada is probably led by banking with some wealth in trying to work in. So it's very difficult to. To this. The firms have succeeded, I think in the US have put a significant other their investment dollars in integrating the systems within firms in the US, by firms, by lease platforms, take them in and just have them a standalone experience that's really not going to work. So firms like, you know, for years we saw proposed generation financial planning, investment is all three separate pillars in wealth. And if the firms have succeed, they've done a really good job of tying all those together and creating that common dimension for the common data layer. So as you move data between different applications, you can access the same, you know, common record. Right? So I've seen, you know, firms who have spent 30 or 40, up to 50% of their annual technology budgets are on maintenance and integration. So it's a constant redoing of is that every year you're gonna see new platforms come into play. You're going to rewrite existing legacy platforms to new ones. So a big focus of all that is not just building application itself, but actually spending a lot of time on integrating not just the back end systems, but also spend quite a bit of time on the journey on the user experience. And, you know, most firms I've seen have you 10 to 15, you know, UX experts on staff, the bigger ones especially that spend all their time really designing and redesigning, rethinking through the experience and creating that unified, unified vision. A few firms in the US, I know are focusing a lot on integrating both a self-directed advisory and trust business into one, so they see the opportunity to, as I mentioned before, you have to keep them together. So advisors have the opportunity to talk to a client about what do you want invested in yourself? What can I help you with? What can I have discretion on and kind of manage for you? And what can you work with you on? Firm terms of an estate planning perspective? Have it all in one common element. So I look at a client record. I could see everything about that client so I can manage he or she in a much, much better way.

Speaker 2 :Okay. Crystal ball time. So five years from now, what's the landscape look like?

Speaker 3 :That's a good question. I think it's a bit more the same. I think you see quite a bit more AI being used, I think. I think at some point the people will get over the fear, and the UI will be a big part of how advisors access information. I think you'll see a lot of firms use AI as a way to manage the business better, right? So if you want to go, if you're running a well through the study, you know what advisor doing. Well, right? Why are they doing well right. You know, you have to go through poor through a lot of data. You've got to talk to them. You got to read through all their notes. Right. Why this advisor, he or she is taking more notes. And the other wise, he's doing better. I think I will definitely help with managing the business. I think you'll see a lot more. I used to help, well, firms run their business. I think I see advisors be okay with using it as part of their day to day. I think you'll see clients actually start to use as well. Might be a part of that conversation with AI, and also using it on the self-directed side as well. I think you see quite a bit of AI usage. I think you'll see more convergence of product that you'll see a lot more, risk protection as well. So I mentioned annuities that you see a lot more incorporation of insurance and annuities and other products that can help manage money. I think as we age, you know, five years from now, hopefully we'll all be able but wealthier, you'll see some of the as you mentioned, some of the boomers really get to the end of life stages where they'll have to make sure they protect their assets of the a lot more annuity work as well, and annuity and insurance and protection of part of those assets.

Speaker 2 : So all right. Terrific. We'll have to leave it here. Charles, thank you so much for coming.

Speaker 3 :Welcome. Okay.

Speaker 2 Fascinating discussion. I'm going to turn things over to Pablo now.

Speaker 1 :Thank you, Dan and Charles, for that enlightening discussion. Next, we have a panel of industry experts to pick them to pick up on some of the trends that Charles has brought up and how these developments are playing out in practice. We have an excellent group for this discussion. I'm very excited to introduce them. First, we have Jackie Allard, group head of global wealth management at Scotiabank. Next we have Rowena Chan, president of Sunlight Financial Distributors Canada. And Rowena is also vice president of retail advice and solutions. Also joining us is Tim Evans, chief operating officer of wealth management in Canada for Canaccord Genuity. And finally we have Chris Perry, president of Broadridge. Well, it's great to have you all here. We just heard in that great discussion a lot of talk about technological advancements and developments and that are happening in the US, and want to get your thoughts about what's happening here in Canada. Of course, the big trend of the day everyone's been talking about is AI. And it's still very early days for this technology. But what's really interesting, we just published a story this morning about Capgemini. World Wealth Report cited half of global world wealth leaders are investing in eight in AI already, and three quarters plan to expand their investments into that. So I wanted to hear directly from you in terms of how you're embracing that technology and how it will allow advisors to be best for your jobs. So, Jacqui, start with us on that.

Speaker 4 :Okay, great. Well, we certainly are investing in this space. And at Scotiabank, I think if I think about the promise that I can bring to our industry, there are several different value levers that we can we can pull with this kind of technology. The first is around advisor productivity. I think our previous speaker spoke well about that. Whether that's opportunity spotting, whether it's client servicing, we see a real opportunity for AI to play a role. Probably to his point. First, in terms of, in terms of what that can provide to the industry, but it's also, I think has amazing promise in terms of how we add value to clients. If you think about just the ability to personalize at scale, with, with that kind of technology, I think that's that's really exciting, really thinking about what? And helping the advisor find the right solutions to clients as opposed to having to do all of it themselves. So we're really excited about if I think about how we unlock that. I would say a few different things. One is it's important to to test and learn like a small piece of concepts allow us to pivot, think about to incorporate learnings, move on, and then be able to, make our solutions are much stronger. We're we're relying on our partners, a number of the partners that, that we work with, you know, whether that's Microsoft or, conquest was mentioned in the previous session. Like, they have capabilities that we can leverage as part of, of our tooling and solutions. I think the other thing that's important from our perspective is that really this comes down to how good is your data. So this ultimately has to be linked with a fulsome data strategy, cloud acceleration as part of that for, for Scotiabank. But data is, is is what actually powers these, these technologies. And so that has to be thought of first and foremost.

Speaker 1 Interesting. I would do want to get into that a little bit further a little bit later. But Rowena, maybe your turn here. Tell us a little bit about how sun life is in for sure.

Speaker 5 : So I think the touch on all the benefits. Right. So, so for me, I think ease and convenience, so important to our clients and to our advisors. So we are also investing a lot on AI and also needs to tie back to a very proper and very, I would say, very committed data strategy. Right. Clean data is so important, and AI is so much about unstructured data too. And we'll give out unstructured data type of output. So we have to be careful about it. So I would say sun Life is using a very safe and also responsible way to experiment how we can use AI. I give you a few examples. One is actually using we talk about conquest. So we, we encode a plan. So we every one of our advisors, asked to do a plan with our client. So the plan is, AI powered. So they do thousands of calculations based on clients data. So the advice and solutions are personalized and just really fast, right? So it really gives time back to our advisors. I'll be very quick. And we have now looking at experimenting NLP taking assistant. So it will help advisor to say if I go on zoom go on teams I will actually be able to summarize in in notes. Right. So then the advisor can take a look at it. It help with compliance regulations, time saving. So these are just some of the examples.

Speaker 1 : Interesting. And Tim tell us a little bit about how you're doing it.
v Speaker 6 : A category very similar to my esteemed colleagues here I would say, you know it's early innings and I don't want to if there's post-traumatic stress disorder for PTSD. For Jays fans, early innings means we're down seven. Nothing in that in the second inning. But it is early innings and our our chief technology officer will talk as a rest API. There's crawl walk, run. And I would say for CG we are absolutely, involved in AI and making big investments there. But we're in the crawl stage, reaching into maybe walking. We were fortunate we were one of, you know, fairly small number of companies globally that was invited to, work with Microsoft on their Copilot initiative. So there's some interesting applications you can see there. Arena mentioned, you know, in the context of a teams meeting, and we're doing this with internal meetings to start. You can. The teams meeting. It'll summarize and annotate everything. That said, that's not really a big deal, but where it gets more interesting is it's the summary what happened in that meeting and then action steps. Tim, you need to do that. Jackie, you need to do that. Doesn't work perfectly, but it actually gets you a long way. And then the next bridge is can you take those action notes and embedded into your CRM system? So Tim's partner on the team, you need to deliver this document to this client. You know, ruinous person you need to do this. And it what it does is it facilitates and enables and eliminates a bunch of manual labor. That's probably better time spent elsewhere. And it probably means that you're more efficient. And for the adviser, ultimately it'll be a better client experience. So it's exciting, but it's early innings. And I would reinforce what we said earlier about data. It's absolutely critical. You have to have a data strategy. Otherwise none of this works well.

Speaker 1 :Interesting. And Chris talks about how Broadridge is integrating AI into the tools we're developing. The discussions you're having about it with your clients and how it's, you know, being positioned within the discussions you're having internally about the future of the tools you produce.

Speaker 7 :Sure. Thank you to you and The Globe Mail for hosting us all here today. And thank you for all coming. We're the one technology company on the panel, so you won't be surprised that we have really wrapped our arms around AI. We we really immersed ourselves in it. We think of it in three dimensions. One is de-risk. One is grow, and one is reduce cost. Now, the best scenario is something that is AI driven, that does all three of those things. I will reiterate the data set underneath it. And the data strategy is critically critically important. I won't talk about that because everybody said that. But that's really important. The old garbage in, garbage out will create a real problem. We believe that the hyper personalization dimension is, is one of the most powerful elements. Because let's remember advisors, they're typically EQ driven people. They're relationship driven people. They're not. No offense to any of them. They're not intellectually analytically driven. And what they do every day now they have a friend right next to them in well developed AI that can inform them of ideation faster than they've ever been able to do their own research. So we're trying to I of five, which is an expression that we use all of our products. There's an a, a dimension of AI that will either derisk help growth or reduce core operating costs in all of the offerings that we have out there. And all of that leads to creating the best ever experience between an advisor and their client, which we believe will be a differentiator in asset gathering. In the end, clients of assets held away. You don't know about all their assets. This toolset gives you the ability to get a lot more information, insights, and then what we try to do is create a mechanism by which you can gather assets. So that's one example in the wealth space that we're doing it.

Speaker 1 Interesting. So the transformation of this industry and technology, I just put a part of it of a fully integrated suite of tools and different technologies. So I'm interested in finding from you and especially, you know, in terms of data, you mentioned that, in terms of where you're spending in terms of next gen technologies. I know that there was a certain report from, from your firm, Chris, that cited, wealth managers across the world. Did investing in data analysis and visualization, cybersecurity, cloud platforms and want to know in terms of how you're investing in those, as well as any other tools and how they're essentially helping you in this transformation. So, Rubina, maybe start with us on this one.

Speaker 5 :Yeah. So there's so much happening on the digital transformation leveraging technology. So, maybe I'll share a few things like Sun Life has 160 years history. So we have a lot of legacy platforms. So, so we need to do like real platform modernization. And, but we also know we need to go with speed and flexibility. So what we're trying to do right now is really use a modular architecture for our platform, really build modules on top of our existing platform so we can move faster. So that's one of the focus. The other focus is like going back to the whole digitization. I won't repeat, but I also want to emphasize that sometimes not just really the big sexy thing sometimes is really how you put through, straight through processing, as mentioned earlier, or RPA process, when you clean up a process, how do you use robotic automation to make it faster and easier? Now our advisor need to, like any advisor, need to talk to clients on a regular basis. KYC keep you need to do a lot of prep work. So we RPA the. A prep work process. So within seconds. Right. So you the system pull from five different platforms, get the clients data. So prepare the package for the advisor so that before they need to spend 30 40 minutes to prepare a package. If you think about you have hundreds and thousands of clients, that's major savings. So I think there is the big T of transformation and then small T that you can actually chip it away. So as long as it's going in the same direction.

Speaker 1 :Interesting. And Tim Canaccord, were you investing your assets in terms of that technological transformation? Where are you seeing the greatest benefits thus far?

Speaker 6 :Yeah, lots, lots of investment in technology. It's a heavy, heavy spend. And that's one of the areas that if you look at the at the income statement, you know, that's you know that in many, you know, compliance wouldn't be the two. You know, two areas where we're spending heavily. I'll highlight maybe a couple of areas. We've spent a lot of money in and, you know, both time and money in our managed account technology. So it was interesting to hear Charles, talk about unified managed accounts. So we have, a fully functional and production unified managed account program and, and product that can rival anything in the US. What's interesting about that is it does lend itself to, automating much of the technology. But ultimately what it enables you to do is build a better client solution. You know, when you think about, separately managed accounts in the 90s into the 2000s, they had their time, they fit. But there's limitations. You think about simplistically, if you wanted to have the most basic portfolio, 50% equity, 50% fixed income with SMEs, that meant two separate accounts. That meant two sets of paperwork. How do you rebalance if the equities are running? You've got to you've got to raise cash journal cash across into the fixed income account. So guess what doesn't happen. The journaling doesn't happen. So you're off unified managed account. Version 1.0 is you can put two SMEs in one account. But beyond that what we've done is we've said SMEs don't always work. They're not always the best client solution. Sometimes you need a monetized product. Maybe for emerging markets high yield debt you can easily in their model and our advisors build these. Have your SMEs add in high yield debt or emerging markets. And beyond that, if you happen to be an advisor who's also a perform portfolio manager, you can embed a sleeve as an advisor. If they said, you know what, I like my expertise as it relates to Canadian equities. You can put that sleeve inside of a unified managed account model, have everything happening in one account, traded centrally, traded efficiently. Then when you marry that and say we're going to embed and integrate the investment proposal, the managed account technology and trading, the performance reporting, the compliance. Now you're talking about a lot of efficiency. So that's a big heavy investment. Maybe I'll pause there because I'm looking at our clock.

Speaker 1 :But oh we got time.

Speaker 6 : Okay.

Speaker 4 : So I'm guessing our next.

Speaker 1 :Yes.

Speaker 4 :Well, okay, so I won't I don't want to repeat what my esteemed colleagues have talked about, but maybe I'd say philosophically, when we think about our our technology investments and the, and, and how we prioritize them, we think about it in a couple of different pillars. So the first is around, fantastic client digital experiences. That would include things like our, Scotia Wealth Management mobile app, for example, and developments we're doing there. In our retail channel, that would be investments we're making in Social Smart Investor. So it's around, great client interaction and, and not only bringing them the data that they want, but also enabling interaction at, at that, at that client point. The next category would be advisor experience. And I think it's I think it's frankly equally important because ultimately, a great client, a great advisor experience allows an advisor to deliver a great client experience. You know, here we're largely using, commercially available, products that many, many of those in the room would also be leveraging. And I think, the way you can add value is to is how we integrate them at the desktop. So how do we make them, well integrated for our advisors? Give them, one place to go to access everything that they need to prepare efficiently for client meetings to, you know, write down, to be able to answer their questions when they call them on the phone. So investing in our advisor desktop and the the integration to all of those tools is really important. And all of that has to be supported. As I said earlier, through the foundation and the foundation, that's the data strategy. It's how we manage the core systems. You know, we're a firm that grew up through a series of acquisitions like many others. So we also have at the core, you know, different back end systems. But ultimately we don't want our advisors or our clients. We don't want them that that to be an issue for them at all. We want to to rob that for our clients. So if I pick just one thing that we're focused on from an investment perspective in there, it's, you know, our philosophy in Scottish wealth management is we are we practice total wealth. We are, we are. We lead with deep discovery planning, goals based advice. And then we, we try to rob the whole of wealth management and the bank around those, those client needs. And so one of the things that we're investing in heavily right now is, is planning and holistic advice. We are launching a product based, in partnership with conquest, called, Scotia Wealth Architects. And really, we're really excited about that because ultimately it brings that value proposition to life in a very real way, both for clients and advisors.
Speaker 1 : Great. Interested to hear more about that. But to keep the conversation going, Chris, maybe you can tell us a little bit about your experience in working with, a lot of wealth management firms here in Canada, the U.S. and worldwide in terms of where some of the most successful, technological investments are.

Speaker 7 :Yeah. Well, we have the privilege and good fortune of working with so many wealth management firms north and south of the border. It's very exciting place to be in a fantastic industry, and we don't take that lightly. What we have really found is that there is no one supplier, no one institution who can provide everything for everyone. There's so many different dimensions of wealth. You have to contemplate a component sized or you used what was the expression? Rowena modular modular module. So we have taken a component sized approach with an integration services layer that allows for communication across applications. Because integration is so expensive. And the idea behind, having a toolset that allows for the best of breed, whatever a client chooses is best of breed that we can integrate. And one of the things that we do is back office data and insights. And when you have connectivity into all the back office insights and data, you can apply AI to it through an integration services layer. You can have an onboarding module, you can have a wealth planning module, and it can be from wherever you would choose. You can have a CRM module and we think that's the right way to approach it. We think the companies that have accelerated fast this have embraced that really well. A combination of what do you buy versus what do you build. And you build the most differentiated elements that are allowing you to get your version of wealth. I mean, there's a lot of wealth management firms and there's a place for all of them. But what's your differentiation? What's your secret differentiation? It could be hyper personalization. It could be what what we call bionic investing, which is a combination of robo investing next to human investing. And there's a lot of different variations. But the idea is have firms take the very, very important but kind of, you know, essential, but but relatively common things, acquire them from the right providers and then invest your dollars in differentiated asset gathering or, client reporting. We've also invested a lot in sleeve based accounting, because that's one of the other complexities, is when you want to bring assets from multiple places together, you better be able to performance report on them. You better be able to goals plan on them. So you need sophisticated capabilities that can work through the integration layer to gather everything from wherever it is to provide a very simplistic but, you know, meaningful but in your clients knowledge Layperson's knowledge that says I am on my path. If it's oversimplified, they'll think it's for the Gen Z's, but it's got to have the right balance of all that, and it needs to be very visual. Somebody people talking about visualization is a really important thing for the advisor and the clients. So this component architecture allows you to do that with best of breed.

Speaker 1 :Interesting. So I want to move on from technology a little bit and talk about what are the most prevalent challenges for wealth management firms. And that's the competition for advisory talent. Making the issue more acute is that the average age in the industry is now in the mid 50s, and so there will be a pending wave of retirements in the next decade and beyond. So we want to find out from, from our wealth management, panelists, in terms of what efforts you're all making to attract and retain talent, and most critically, what are you doing to foster the next generation of advisors? What skill sets are paramount for them to have? And what about in terms of bringing on more women to the industry, more diverse people, to the industry within these ranks? Kim, tell us a little bit about the efforts you're making it.

Speaker 6 :Sure. I'll talk about recruiting and, retaining advisors. I think for us, we're trying to create a platform where advisors can grow full stop. So and we we've had some success, like over the past 7 or 8 years, we've I think we've compounded at just over 20%. So we're if we're not the fastest growing firm, we're one of the fastest growing firms. And the reason you know that that happens is it's a little it's it's a combination. It's it's the platform that enables with some of the technology we've. Talked about. It's an openness to different forms of business. There's not a one size fits all in our estimation. We like centralized trading and whatnot, but we do have transaction oriented advisors on our platform. All of those advisors, regardless of business style, can thrive on our platform. So it's all about enabling advisors to grow. And what we've seen in particular on the recruiting side. When advisors join our platform, we see. I've been at CG for six years. There was an advisor who joined at the same period of time, just slightly after me came to us with 250 million. He'll crack through $1 billion this week. Why is that? He's leveraging our managed account technology, managing four times the amount of money with the same size of team. We've got a big marketing team that is, you know, advisor centric. So that helps him grow. And he's not unique. So if that works for recruiting and it's a it's a growth platform for advisors that's going to help us retain. So it's it's a combination of many things for recruiting and retaining. But ultimately we're in the advisor business. And if we have a place where they can grow, all things being equal, they're going to they're going to join us and they're going to stick with us.

Speaker 1 : Great. Jackie, give us a sense in terms of how for talent, attracting and retaining is a key priority for you and your team.

Speaker 4 :I think the absolute most important thing is culture. You have to create a culture that values what advisors do and demonstrate a track record of supporting them in growing their businesses outside and said, you know, if I think about how we recruit, there's basically two ways of doing it right. We can recruit from each other, or we can train advisors as rookies. And we do both of those things. But the way I think we solve the problem that you highlighted, which is the diversity problem, is, is through our rookie programs. And so, you know, as well as we have multiple channels, we have, on the wealth advisory side, a private investment council and jaroslovsky private wealth. We also have Scotia macleod and our private banking business. We have one rookie program that supports all of those businesses. We bring them in. We train them for a year. Really promising amazing talent. And the thing that we're most most interested in is attracting advisors who can connect with people at a human level. But that is the most important thing. Everything else we can train. So we're looking for people that put the client first, that want to practice total wealth, that want to be holistic wealth, wealth advisors, regardless of the channel that they ultimately move into. We bring them in and we support them with a year of training. And then we we really allow them to self-select into the right channel for them, the one that that meets their need and where they we think that they're the best fit. And we find that to be really important because diversity in our industry is a problem. It is a problem for all the reasons that you mentioned in your generational wealth transfer, growing. When you when you consider the importance of immigration in this country and how wealth is being generated by, first generation Canadians and newcomers, we need an advisory force that reflects, the communities that we're trying to serve. And a younger, next gen is, is just so important when you consider, again, that intergenerational transfer is important today, it will be even more important in the future. So that's how we think about it.

Speaker 1 :Interesting. And Rena, talk a little bit about the priority for some life in terms of, bringing on that next generation, making sure that it's a diverse advisory force and as well in terms of attracting and retaining the talent.

Speaker 5 : Yeah. So, similar to Jackie, we also, recruit and train and we also like you, welcome advisors that think that the cultural, platform actually fits their growth strategy better. So we do both. If I have to think about the the next gen. Right. So we have also multiple channels. We created a new channel a couple of years ago called Prosper by Sun Life, which is digital plus human. So digital first really more for the Gen Z and the millennials channel. But there's a team of advisors. So we are also looking at that teams of advisors that holistic that dual licensed. They do plans as the feeder pool for our like field advisors when they are ready or what they choose to while we continue to recruit and train in the field. So so that's one thing. The other is really because we are holistic. We are all of our advisors must do a license. So we are really focusing to team. We have dedicated team to actually help out advisor team. You can team by generations by demographics of advisors, but it could be by skill sets. So you can have a wealth focus advisor with a insurance focus advisor to form team. We also have a succession program, so we'll help advisor transfer book whether it's about operational or financial, from one advisor to another. So those are just some of the examples as to. Succession planning building for the future. I do, however, want to point out about diversity. It is very critical that we have advisors that represent the communities that we serve. Whether it's about new Canadians, diverse, like, origins and woman. So we have 36%, woman advisors in our field. So we want to we actually want to go to 40% soon. And so we have we are very, very focused into bringing in women advisors, but somehow is a bit of a cycle when you have more role models. We have successful women advisors. Then they attract the next generations. So we are we are very committed to doing that.

Speaker 1 : Interesting. And Chris, from your perspective, what are the most important skills that you're seeing from from working with so many firms in terms of, the important skills that they have, when recruiting new advisors, what are they what are they most looking at? What do they have to to attract and retain?

Speaker 7 Yeah, it's a real conundrum because you have these mid-fifties and and older advisors out there who are somewhat fat, happy with books that they built from wealthy people over many years. You've got an industry that doesn't necessarily have the greatest reputation out there, which is sad, because what we all do is we help people be able to live when they no longer can work or no longer want to work, if they're fortunate enough that they can be in that position. So the skills that we've seen is, we've seen a heavy emotional intelligence. We've seen a real move to people understand and understanding digital first. The mid 50s are not digital first. They're digital. They're kind of digital enabled versus digital natives. So we've seen that dimension. We've seen a lot of pods created. I do think one of the flaws in the industry is it's a little bit of a sink or swim in history historically. And we're we're kind of breaking that a lot. But the idea that a person can be through a year training program and they'll swim like masters right away is a difficult one. So partnering or pods that create a group together and, and have, you know, skill sets that are training people on the human interaction, on the tool technology. In fact, some firms are creating, you know, pods that have complementary skills, super EQ people next to people that they think have the skill set but are very analytical. And then and then the diversity of generation that sits inside the pod is important because the industry needs to evolve to where when you're young, you have a lot of promise. So let's invest in your promise as opposed to today. You're young, you don't have any money. You could be a robo advisor at one of the robo platforms. And the best way I've seen that done is firms that that really force that on the right way. Connectivity between parent, grandparents, parents, children, and the grandchildren because that brings them in where they are in their journey and makes them part of something. And what it really does is it prevents the loss of those assets when the family ends up having an event and there's a generational transfer. Because if you look at the surveys that are out there, the amount of generational transfer is accelerating so that when grandpa dies, whatever grandchild gets in a really wealthy family is not staying in that firm. And the way you work with that is leverage the technology, leverage the relationship, create paths of people where a Gen Z can actually mentor a Boomer at the at the high end of that. And so these are the kinds of things that we've seen have worked really well.

Speaker 1 Interesting. So one of focus a little bit more on that. And that's of course because of the changing demographics within the client force as well. And so one of the things that we're seeing, we heard earlier, of course, the beginning of the mass retirement among baby boomers, the initial stages of the great wealth transfer. Also one of the one of the elements that's often missed there is the spousal wealth transfer. That's going to happen first, right? And we've seen all kinds of reports saying that 80% of women leave their advisors. And so what I want to hear from you in terms of how your teams are being positioned to serve this, this, these demographic changes. And of course, one of the things you alluded to, Jackie, was, the mass migration we've experienced here in Canada, you know, over the last few years and a lot of new Canadians and serving them. Right. And and you address that too. So maybe you can tell us a little bit about how the delivery of wealth management is evolving within your firms to serve these changing, demographics. Yeah. Jackie, start with us on that.

Speaker 4 : I see where you're going now. I knew I was going to be first because I was watching your pattern there. Maybe I speak to both women and then to, to cultural markets. Largely so from a women centric perspective. We have a program called Scotia Women's Initiative, and a specific flavor for that within wealth management, where we basically taken all of our advisors through, training around, female. Issues as it relates to advice and how, how top of mind it has to be for them. No longer can we have advisors giving their business card to the the husband and not creating a relationship with the wife for the next generation. It's just like it's it's horrifying when you hear those stories in our industry. And so, really tooling our advisors with, you know, it's this isn't sensitivity training. This is real training around how to give advice for the things that women care about. And of course, women care about the same thing as men, but they also have specific challenges in some cases that men don't have, career breaks, for example, being something that more women parents deal with than, than male parents. So those are the kinds of things that we're trying to help our advisors with. And that, as I said earlier, the diversity of our advisor force is a is a big part of that. You know, women make fantastic advisors, whether it's, you know, whether it's in Scottish MacLeod or in private investment council. They can have those really human centric conversations with our clients. And so we want we want to attract more women into our industry, to realize that promise, if you think about, immigration, you know, like almost a third of businesses in Canada or small businesses in Canada, are owned by, first generation Canadians or newcomers, 600,000, roughly. You know, self self-employed professionals in this country, building, building wealth. And, and I don't think that the wealth industry has, has really focused on this as a strategy and how important that is not only to our clients, but it's also really important to Canada that, that newcomers are set up for success, that they, they learn our financial system, that they understand the tools and the resources available to them and that we're helping their businesses be successful. And so that is a really important focus for us. Again, in, in, in talks, a lot of different things that will impact how we recruit, how we cover the market, how we train advisors, partnerships that we have products in some cases, that that will be that will need to be tailored, for, for different markets, you know, sponsorships, marketing, everything else that you can imagine are necessary to be successful there.

Speaker 1 : Okay. We know your thoughts on this.

Speaker 5 : Oh, well, maybe I talk a bit more about intergenerational on the wealth side because as I mentioned, we are holistic advisors, a dual license. And so leveraging both like the Uma as I'm a traditional more at the type of wealth management solutions, in addition to leveraging insurance solutions for estate planning, using some insurance solutions as an asset class, you bring it all together and you anchor on a plan. You you really have those conversations with the clients that because we have both of the insurance like wealth, both sides, we can ask for beneficiaries information. We know who they care the most. We actually can get introduced to the family, the those that will be part of this generational transfer. So our game plan is to leverage the plan to bring in the family members, people that the clients care the most and have those conversations very early on. So when an event happen, we are not really seeing the beneficiary for the first time, but it anchors on a plan. So I think that is quite critical.

Speaker 1 : Yeah. And Tim, you mentioned a lot earlier about the importance of growth for your force and wanted to get a sense of how these change demographics are playing into that growth for these advisors.

Speaker 6 :Yeah, I mean, we're focused on share of wallet. Like that's a big piece for us. Like typically the, you know, existing clients or if they're happy, there's often money sort of held in other institutions. So you know we'll go and try to find money from Scotia and Sunlight, you know, but so a lot of the growth is share of wallet. And it's also it's also finding new clients. But what I would say on, as, as a theme, like CG comes from a place like where we were investment managers, we were a broker dealer. So, you know, historically that would mean, you know, KYC was okay, how much risk can you tolerate what you're not worth? Okay, here's the investment plan. And it's very different now. It's a very different. So I think the answer to a large extent on on much of these things, whether it's you know, newcomers, you know, share of all that said is, is client discovery, is client discovery. So what we're trying to do is put tools and training in place to help our advisors get deeper. You know, historically, like, we'd be guilty of this. Like, you know, you have a client, whether it's a husband or wife, you probably don't know the partner. So get deeper. Client discovery needs to go beyond the the new account application form. So there's tools that we put in place to kind of. Engage in that conversation. I think the other piece of it is, let's face it, we can't be all things to all people. I can't be expert at, you know, newcomers, divorces, business owners, etc. so you either have to pick a pick a lane and stick to it, or develop a team that has some experts, a diverse amount, number of experts that they can, whether it's, you know, maybe an expertise in something, you know, working with newcomers or for instance, have somebody on your team that is a financial planner, you have somebody on your team that is an insurance specialist, have somebody on your team that is a CIO. Then have the people that iteration, rational relationship managers, the people who go out find new clients, who who work with existing clients because you can't be all things to all people. So it's one or the other, or perhaps both. Pick a lane, become an expert, or build a team. Go broader or again with the team. Maybe you're still picking the lane trusted.

Speaker 1 :And see the clock here. We've got about eight minutes or so left and Chris want to turn it over to you now a little bit. Just changing gears and just to close the discussion on another significant challenge for the industry, which is the ever growing need for dealing with rising regulation. As as I'm sure you're aware, here in Canada, we've seen major initiatives CRM one, CRM two client focused reforms. Next shoe to drop will be CRM three now or total cost reporting. And so what tools and technologies are available to help from that perspective in the rising amount of expense that firms are having to spend and work? On, on just being compliant?

Speaker 7 : Yeah. Unfortunately, the surveys that we've done have said that 50% of the investible dollars in most firms have been going towards compliance. That was a bit more a few years ago after global financial crisis. It's not going to stop. I mean, CRM 3 to 9, probably we should be planning for, in Europe. They did SD-Wan, they did a Psd2, in the U.S between abi. And so this is this is a bit of, you know, it's sort of contagious. Okay. And we see more and more of it. What we've tried to do is build components that will solve for it, that can be plugged in to do the analysis. As I said earlier, AI is a big play in this because it again de-risk. Right. So if I can use AI to de-risk by having multiple, bots and bots is not a great word, by the way, but and you're all you're all experiencing bots every day right now. You maybe don't know it or you do, but this is happening every day. And these intelligent bots can bring in de-risking by checking for regulation. There was a big element of ten years ago. No one could use, social media in Israel. If you don't use social media to industry, you're in deep trouble. It it mature and evolved. So adopting new technologies to manage the plethora of regulations, these governing bodies have a responsibility in the US. Gensler had I think 35. We counted 56. But probably if you boil them down 35 initiatives, you can't even keep track of them with a scorecard. So I think partnering in many respects to work on industry standards is really important, working together to ensure that when there's a proposed regulation that the influence from industry is communicate, because a lot of times the regulator, the governing bodies don't really understand the regulations. The regulators do. But the governing bodies are like their lawyers that are not in the financial services space. They don't understand the practicality. So it's really important for the industry to work together to communicate. When we see regulation, to do it for the right reasons, to implement it in the right way. And we try to build capabilities that are following the regulation and try to, you know, do programs like the home savings program came out that was really powerful. That was a regulation, very positive regulation. We wanted to be ready right away so that we can work on all the platforms that we were enabling. So I think sticking together, working closely, partnering is really, really important. You know, whoever your partner is, pick your partners, work closely with them and and evolve. Transformation is scary. Everybody talks about transformation. That word is not a great word. Transformation is an outcome of a lot of evolutionary steps that combine to get to a different place that you had a vision for. If you start to just throw transformation around, it could be very daunting. And so we try to do it in an evolutionary, way.

Speaker 1 : Okay and work in this way. Tim. In terms of, the compliance and focus on regulation. Tell us a little bit about the efforts you're making, at Canaccord to, create systems, systems or processes to ease this burden.

Speaker 6 :Yeah. Like I think, what I would say is regulation, compliance, like, it's the new rules, the client focused reforms. They're all come from a great place. Like, ultimately, we're trying to protect our clients, our advisors, and the industry in general. To your point, sometimes, you know, the practical, application is, is maybe there's a disconnect. So that's that's where talking about it, I think is, is important and refining. But from our perspective, again, it it's kind of going back to a similar theme. I would say to like it's technology and training, you know, so how can you use technology? We recently implemented a system that, it's basically it's like a compliance office. It's all automated. You know, our advisors can go in, they can do all their attestations around outside activities, around their accounts, you know, did they read this? And it's a way for us to for the advisor to stay on top of everything that he or she needs to be on top of, but also our compliance partners so that we know we have integrity in terms of, you know, are we on side and, you know, piecemeal. It was piecemeal. Before you think about outside activity, it was, you know, paper scattered all over the place, having it centralized in one central location. Good data again, makes life a whole lot easier. So that's one of the things we've done on the tech side. Then training is really it's around awareness. You know, like there's depending on the industry participant, you know, you have a continuum from I'm going to take this really seriously to this doesn't apply to me. But having like we are in a rapid change, situation when it comes to regulation, compliance. And there's a lot to keep track of. So it's it's really meant, you know, upping our communication, you know, whether that's email webinars, one on ones in branch just to make sure that that our advisors and our support staff, head office, etc. understand what's happening and what it means for us and what we have to do. So it's going to keep going. I agree with you. You know that it's never going to stop. But, you know, again, I'll go back to that original point. As much as it can be frustrating, it comes from a good place. And ultimately it's about the integrity and the trust in our industry. And without it, you know, we can't flourish.

Speaker 1 :Okay. And to close out, Rowena and Jackie, you're both with major institutions, multiple lines of businesses. Compliance is such a major issue in all of those. So maybe just a minute each in terms of tell us a bit about how you're handling that burden.

Speaker 5 : Sure. So our advisors are independent contractors. They have many different practice structures. Some are individual, some have a team of like 50 people. So for us, the number one thing is we want to standardize as much as possible and simplify as much as possible, and so that it makes their lives easier. We don't have multiple versions of, compliance. Number one. Number two, I go back to digitization, to centralization of data. Right. One place it help us with knowledge management, help us with training, actually save advisor time. We actually don't have to go to the office, right. If we do review, if we have to do review because everything is digitized and you can actually like do the review remotely, right? So is a deficiency play. So last thing I would say is, I think we mentioned earlier is advocacy work with partners but also work with regulators. Stay very close to the regulators, whether it's in the consultation phase or whatever, like it's I think then it won't be surprise or make the implementation more pragmatic. There more dialog. So to get to a more smooth the implementation success.

Speaker 1 Great. Jackie.

Speaker 4 : Let's look I'll keep it really brief. I think maybe just building on something that Tim said. Ultimately, the global trend here is about increasing transparency. And this ultimately builds clients, trust in us. And that's something that we should all embrace as an industry. So like I think these these trends are actually very positive. And if we can make it, if we can make it easy and, and we can make it, efficient for our advisors and, and for our clients to help us comply with this, ultimately, it keeps them safe. It keeps the bank safe. And so we see this as very positive.

Speaker 1 : Great. Thank you. Well, we have to leave it there. I'd like to thank Jackie Rowena, Tim, Chris, for joining us this afternoon for this, enlightening discussion. I learned a lot. Thank you on behalf. After the Globe Mail. I also want to thank Broadridge. For making this event possible. And of course, a huge thank you to all of you in the audience for sharing your time with us.