Humanizing Financial Advice with Fintech

It is difficult to find evidence that Canada’s finance sector is serious about keeping up with the fintech revolution happening in other parts of the world. Of particular concern is the fact that Canada is falling behind in robo-advice solutions. A major reason for this is a fear of a killing off of industry jobs. But in reality, the future of the advice sector won’t be dominated by robots. It will be a hybrid market in which human advisors use digital techniques to gather data and generate recommendations faster and more objectively than they do today. The conclusion that financial advisors are moving to a “behavioural-based” world was laid out in Financial Advice in Canada: A Way Forward, an Ivey paper written with Ivey’s Scotiabank Digital Banking Lab. With the industry about to change, the following five things need to happen: 1) finance education needs to include more behavioural (and not just technical) skills; 2) regulators need to change their licensing and proficiency requirements to include more skills in interpreting and explaining numbers; 3) firms need to add to their hiring criteria a new component that demonstrates a candidate’s capacity to learn and deliver behavioural-based insights; 4) existing advisors need to go back to school to be as up to date as new recruits; and 5) product providers (e.g., fund companies) will need to nudge their value propositions.

• Fintech revolution, Robo-advisors, financial sector disruption, Canadian fintech ecosystem