Submission to Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada’s Consultations on
​AI Transparency
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Executive Summary

Wealthsimple appreciates the opportunity to participate and make the following recommendations:

About Wealthsimple

Wealthsimple is Canada’s leading financial innovator. The company offers a full suite of simple, sophisticated financial products across chequing and spending, managed investing, self-directed trading, and tax filing. Wealthsimple serves more than 4 million Canadians, holds more than $155 billion in assets under administration (as of June 30, 2026), and employs more than 1,500 Canadians from coast to coast.

AI is embedded in how we operate, how we protect clients from fraud, and how we attract and cultivate talent. We also operate inside one of Canada’s most heavily supervised regulatory regimes.

As Canadians continue to find ways to help make our economy more sovereign and resilient, the Government of Canada should continue to find ways to support economic growth and productivity, while ensuring consumers can trust the institutions they engage with, including through the use of AI-enabled tools and technologies.

About our clients

Nearly 1 in 4 Canadians aged 18-40 uses Wealthsimple. In the quarter ending June 30, 2026, we reported record growth. This reach gives us a unique vantage point on a generation often missing from policy conversations.

1 in 4 millennial clients and 1 in 5 Gen Z clients made regular contributions to their registered accounts last year, and our youngest clients led every other generation in their use of automated investing. Despite cost-of-living pressures, they are putting what they can into TFSAs, RRSPs and other registered and investment accounts to save for their future - even while home ownership, the wealth-building tool that worked for their parents, often feels unattainable.

Our clients value choice, transparency, and access to tools that give them the level of control they want at different life stages.

AI’s growing role in financial services

Many Canadians are already utilizing AI as part of their financial life. A June 2026 report by Money Mentors and Angus Reid found that one in seven Canadians used AI tools for financial guidance in the past year alone.¹ Importantly, Gen Z reported the highest use of AI for financial guidance, with nearly one in four (22%) using an AI tool.
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​Recent research from the United Kingdom’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) shows even more widespread use of AI for financial guidance. In a July survey of adults aged 18 to 40, the FCA found more than half (56%) trust investing information from AI tools — ahead of mainstream media at 46% and social media influencers at 29%.² 80% had used AI for investing help, with two-thirds doing so occasionally or regularly.

Importantly, the Money Mentors and Angus Reid report found that among Canadians who sought online advice, one in three said it feels more relatable, personal or easy to understand, and nearly one in four (23%) said they can receive advice without feeling judged. ​
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​It is important for financial services companies to acknowledge, understand and where possible, embrace this. Failing to appropriately utilize AI, especially when clients are already doing so on their own behalf, risks new or increased gaps in financial literacy, and foregoes an opportunity for innovation that can help support clients in their financial journeys.

How Wealthsimple approaches artificial intelligence

At Wealthsimple, artificial intelligence is our accelerator. It's part of how we build products and features, how we serve and interact with clients, and how we protect them from external threats. Wealthsimple operates with both speed and agility, and AI helps us expand that advantage.

Making AI disclosures clear & simple

Wealthsimple works to ensure our clients clearly understand our use of AI. We do this by publishing a standalone, public AI Disclosure. The disclosure identifies categories of client-facing AI used by Wealthsimple, and states plainly that a client using these services is interacting with artificial intelligence. We currently use AI in providing the following services:

Our disclosure also includes important limitations and information on how AI processes client information, among other key details.

Other firms that operate in trust-dependent markets should consider similar disclosures that go beyond a generic “you are talking to a bot” notice. ​ ​

Leveraging AI to combat fraud and protect Canadian consumers
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​Today’s scams are harder to spot than ever. Criminals are using AI to impersonate friends and family, flood socials with fraudulent ads and send sophisticated scams directly to Canadians’ phones. Canadians lost $704 million to scams in 2025, the worst year on record.

The pace of change makes this a critical moment to act. As AI makes it increasingly difficult to tell what’s real, we cannot afford for Canadians to lose trust in the institutions, businesses and people they rely on. That has implications far beyond fraud, including for governments. Keeping Canadians safe and confident in an AI-enabled world is increasingly a question of national resilience. ​

The fraud environment is evolving quickly, moving from attacking platforms to attacking the people that use them. Wealthsimple is standing with our clients to fight scams, and using AI to help. We have successfully deployed AI to help protect clients in a number of innovative ways, including real-time identity verification and "liveness" checks to counter generative AI-enabled fraud, and continuous behavioural monitoring across our platform.

This is exemplified by Wealthsimple’s use of AI to detect and warn clients about ​ pump-and-dump scams. Scammers manipulate small-cap stocks and use social media to recruit retail investors into investment groups, convince them of the potential returns, then rug pull — and the stock price collapses. The effects can be devastating. ​
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​To help combat this type of manipulation, we built an LLM-based detection system that cross-validates social media activity, news coverage, and trading patterns in real time. When we see a stock moving in ways that aren't backed up by legitimate news, or that's being talked about on social media in ways that match the scam pattern, we automatically place warnings in front of clients who are about to buy in — explaining what these schemes look like and what the risks are. Clients shown the warning are 92% less likely to buy a stock than other clients.

Fraud that targets people is particularly insidious because of how deeply emotional it can be. Scammers have often spent weeks, months and sometimes years building trust and isolating their victim from friends, family and even their financial institutions, all with the aim of influencing decisions. ​
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​To help combat this unique kind of fraud, Wealthsimple built its Spellbreakers team. This highly-specialized team calls clients directly to make real-time interventions when our systems have detected a client may be targeted. Technology is paired with human empathy and expertise to help clients stay one step ahead of scammers. Wealthsimple’s Spellbreakers program has identified and prevented nearly $30M in potential scam losses.

Wealthsimple’s use of AI-enabled security measures illustrates what is needed to help protect Canadians in a rapidly evolving landscape. We believe top financial institutions can help promote best practices on AI-forward security measures in order to better protect Canadians, with the government playing a facilitating role.

Investing in talent

Wealthsimple continues to invest heavily in early talent. At Wealthsimple, we are excited about a generation that is the first AI-native cohort to enter the workforce. We don’t view this as an adaptation challenge, but as an opportunity to approach hiring and early talent investment differently. For example, Wealthsimple Launchpad is a 12-month paid internship program for recent high school grads looking to kickstart their career and gain experience in the operations of a fast-growing tech company. ​

Additionally, earlier this year, Wealthsimple launched its AI Builders program, a small team focused on substantial, workflow-level problems where AI can materially change throughput or quality. Our AI Builders team is made up entirely of young Canadians recruited through an open call for candidates to demo their own AI tools.

Wealthsimple has also embraced early talent development more broadly. Our internship program is growing from 150 interns in 2026 to more than 200 in 2027. We welcome the opportunity to work with the government to build a bold strategy to make young Canadians the most AI-productive workers in the world.

The importance of regulatory coherence

Financial services in Canada is among the most regulated sectors of our economy. Wealthsimple alone is subject to multiple federal and provincial regulators. We were the first Canadian fintech to join SWIFT, alongside Canada’s five big banks, with an onboarding process that included stringent regulatory and operational requirements. These regulatory regimes have a depth of expertise in addressing disclosure, suitability, recordkeeping, model documentation, incident reporting and consumer redress.

The government should be thoughtful about how additional AI-related legislative or regulatory requirements could duplicate existing or expected financial services regulation. The impact of this duplication ranges from confusion arising from conflicting definitions of the same concept across two jurisdictions or regulatory schemes, to additional red tape in the form of regulatory burden. This can ultimately hamper competition when the same outcome could be achieved through thoughtful regulatory harmonization without placing undue burden on Canadian companies.
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​If the government intends to introduce AI-related legislation or regulation, particularly as it relates to AI incidents, Wealthsimple encourages regulatory and sectoral engagement to avoid overlap. The consultation white paper recognizes that pre-existing mandatory incident reporting regimes exist in health, transport and consumer products. Additionally, payment service providers (PSPs) already have stringent incident reporting requirements under the Retail Payment Activities Act. Adding a parallel, AI-specific incident reporting regime would create unnecessary red tape. Reporting pathways to CIRO, FINTRAC and the Privacy Commissioner among others already exist; considering them when addressing AI-specific incidents may be faster and more effective.

Additionally, we encourage the government to consider how other jurisdictions are designing appropriate regulatory frameworks for emerging AI capabilities in financial services, such as ‘know your agent.’ For example, in March 2026, the UK’s FCA announced it will work with the UK Treasury to modernize the regulation of payment services and electronic money, including considering whether change is needed to support agentic AI payments.³

We appreciate ISED’s recognition of the challenges that come with additional reporting requirements, particularly on AI incidents. We encourage substantive engagement with provincial and federal regulators and sectoral leaders throughout the development of any reporting or other regulatory frameworks. ​

Conclusion

As Canada’s leading financial innovator and an AI-first Canadian company, Wealthsimple is ready and willing to engage with government to:

We appreciate the opportunity to participate in the consultation, and will continue to look for opportunities to engage further to support Canadian consumers and Canadian talent. ​
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​¹ https://moneymentors.ca/financial-advice-in-the-age-of-social-media-ai-report
​² https://www.investmentexecutive.com/news/regulation/young-investors-welcome-ai-advice/
​³ https://www.fca.org.uk/publication/regulatory-priorities/payments-report.pdf
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