Latest news with #IGWealthManagement

Thorough estate planning ‘one of the most loving things': financial planner

Hamilton Spectator

3 days ago

Business
Hamilton Spectator

Thorough estate planning ‘one of the most loving things': financial planner

What does it matter if I'm going to be dead anyway? It's a comment sometimes heard by Julia Chung, an advice-only financial planner at Spring Planning in Vancouver. Her retort: 'It isn't about you. It's about the people that you leave behind.' Having a well-thought-out estate plan is 'one of the most loving things you can do for your friends and family,' Chung says. And it goes far beyond drawing up a will laying out who gets what when you're six feet under. Indeed, Chung says there's planning that must be done for when you're still among the living, but may have lost the ability to make your own decisions due to dementia or other conditions. People are living longer thanks to advances in science, 'but not all of us are going to live really well,' Chung says. A power of attorney is set out in a document entirely separate from a will, and doesn't automatically default to a spouse or adult child. There are also financial assets that fall outside of a person's will that need to be sorted out, like beneficiary designations for life insurance, RRSPs and TFSAs. The last thing a bereaved loved one wants to do is go on a wild-goose chase for the information they need to tie up financial loose ends, so some of Chung's clients have a binder put together with key information. 'What information do they need? Just having a will isn't going to tell them where you bank or how to access your mail or who your investment adviser is,' says Chung. 'So how do we get that information to them?' Another aspect to think through is how and when any minor children left behind can access their inheritance. Chung recommends structuring a trust so a young person gets the funds in staggered amounts, not in one big lump sum. 'As I always say to my clients when I see this, 'Think back to when you were 18 or 19. Were you making really smart financial decisions? Because I wasn't,'' she says. Last month, IG Wealth Management released its annual estate planning study, which suggested 54 per cent of Canadians lack a plan. Twenty-nine per cent of respondents said their reason for not having an estate plan was their perceived lack of wealth. 'Ironically, I think that in many cases, it's the people who don't have sufficient wealth yet that need to think about estate planning the most, especially if they have dependents,' said Christine Van Cauwenberghe, IG's head of financial planning in Winnipeg. Forty per cent of respondents reported having legal documents in place to safeguard their finances should they be diagnosed with cognitive decline. The survey was conducted online by Pollara Strategic Insights, and polled 1,017 adult Canadians between April 10 and 21. The polling industry's professional body, the Canadian Research Insights Council, says online surveys cannot be assigned a margin of error because they do not randomly sample the population. Van Cauwenberghe says estate planning can be made more complicated in blended families. For instance, it could be all well and good for someone to designate a partner a direct beneficiary for a life insurance policy. But if that partner passes away, children from a previous relationship may be 'completely disinherited,' she says. 'It's usually inadvertent, but it's just due to a lack of planning.' Another item to check off the to-do list is to choose who can serve as executor of your estate, power of attorney and guardian to minor children. It's not necessarily best to have the same person do each job, and it may not make sense to tab someone close to you. 'I think sometimes people choose their executor because they think that person will be offended if you don't choose them. That person would probably be relieved not to be chosen,' says Van Cauwenberghe, adding corporate trustees are an option when there's no one willing or able to take on the tasks. 'It's a big job and understand that most people don't have any experience in it. They don't know what to do, they delay, they make mistakes, they don't reach out to the right experts and it can be very stressful.' Van Cauwenberghe says it can be tough to put these difficult decisions at the top of the priority list. 'If you never set aside the time, it's never gonna happen,' she says. 'But you're not going to be the one to pay the price. It will be your loved ones who will pay the price for your lack of planning.' This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 19, 2025.

Winnipeg Free Press

3 days ago

Business
Winnipeg Free Press

Thorough estate planning ‘one of the most loving things': financial planner

What does it matter if I'm going to be dead anyway? It's a comment sometimes heard by Julia Chung, an advice-only financial planner at Spring Planning in Vancouver. Her retort: 'It isn't about you. It's about the people that you leave behind.' Having a well-thought-out estate plan is 'one of the most loving things you can do for your friends and family,' Chung says. And it goes far beyond drawing up a will laying out who gets what when you're six feet under. Indeed, Chung says there's planning that must be done for when you're still among the living, but may have lost the ability to make your own decisions due to dementia or other conditions. People are living longer thanks to advances in science, 'but not all of us are going to live really well,' Chung says. A power of attorney is set out in a document entirely separate from a will, and doesn't automatically default to a spouse or adult child. There are also financial assets that fall outside of a person's will that need to be sorted out, like beneficiary designations for life insurance, RRSPs and TFSAs. The last thing a bereaved loved one wants to do is go on a wild-goose chase for the information they need to tie up financial loose ends, so some of Chung's clients have a binder put together with key information. 'What information do they need? Just having a will isn't going to tell them where you bank or how to access your mail or who your investment adviser is,' says Chung. 'So how do we get that information to them?' Another aspect to think through is how and when any minor children left behind can access their inheritance. Chung recommends structuring a trust so a young person gets the funds in staggered amounts, not in one big lump sum. 'As I always say to my clients when I see this, 'Think back to when you were 18 or 19. Were you making really smart financial decisions? Because I wasn't,'' she says. Last month, IG Wealth Management released its annual estate planning study, which suggested 54 per cent of Canadians lack a plan. Twenty-nine per cent of respondents said their reason for not having an estate plan was their perceived lack of wealth. 'Ironically, I think that in many cases, it's the people who don't have sufficient wealth yet that need to think about estate planning the most, especially if they have dependents,' said Christine Van Cauwenberghe, IG's head of financial planning in Winnipeg. Forty per cent of respondents reported having legal documents in place to safeguard their finances should they be diagnosed with cognitive decline. The survey was conducted online by Pollara Strategic Insights, and polled 1,017 adult Canadians between April 10 and 21. The polling industry's professional body, the Canadian Research Insights Council, says online surveys cannot be assigned a margin of error because they do not randomly sample the population. Van Cauwenberghe says estate planning can be made more complicated in blended families. For instance, it could be all well and good for someone to designate a partner a direct beneficiary for a life insurance policy. But if that partner passes away, children from a previous relationship may be 'completely disinherited,' she says. 'It's usually inadvertent, but it's just due to a lack of planning.' Another item to check off the to-do list is to choose who can serve as executor of your estate, power of attorney and guardian to minor children. It's not necessarily best to have the same person do each job, and it may not make sense to tab someone close to you. 'I think sometimes people choose their executor because they think that person will be offended if you don't choose them. That person would probably be relieved not to be chosen,' says Van Cauwenberghe, adding corporate trustees are an option when there's no one willing or able to take on the tasks. Monday Mornings The latest local business news and a lookahead to the coming week. 'It's a big job and understand that most people don't have any experience in it. They don't know what to do, they delay, they make mistakes, they don't reach out to the right experts and it can be very stressful.' Van Cauwenberghe says it can be tough to put these difficult decisions at the top of the priority list. 'If you never set aside the time, it's never gonna happen,' she says. 'But you're not going to be the one to pay the price. It will be your loved ones who will pay the price for your lack of planning.' This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 19, 2025.

The Montreal fintech trying to take on Canada's mortgage giants

Globe and Mail

5 days ago

Business
Globe and Mail

The Montreal fintech trying to take on Canada's mortgage giants

Nesto wants to rewire the way Canadians get mortgages, starting with the software. The Montreal-based fintech lender is part of a cohort of online lenders and brokerages such as Pine and Homewise that are taking a digital-first approach to streamline the mortgage experience, promising faster approvals, lower rates and less red tape. Founded in 2018 as a mortgage broker, Nesto shifted to full-scale lending in 2021. Since then, it's been building a platform designed to simplify one of the most complex financial decisions Canadians face: cutting out paperwork, compressing timelines and offering what it calls 'unbiased' digital guidance. After moving into lending, the company quickly recognized that its platform could be an asset for more traditional lenders such as the Big Six financial institutions, says Malik Yacoubi, Nesto's co-founder and chief executive officer. 'We realized that our technology is really powerful and unique in the Canadian market,' Mr. Yacoubi says. 'We [saw] an opportunity to diversify and launch a B2B [business-to-business] line of business.' Alongside its online lending vertical, the Nesto Mortgage Cloud solution supports every step of the mortgage process, from online borrowing applications to supporting financial institutions as they underwrite the loans. Since 2022, Nesto has onboarded financial institutions such as IG Wealth Management, Canada Life and Equitable Bank. Nesto is currently in discussions with most major financial institutions, but it has yet to convince one of the Big Six to adopt its Mortgage Cloud solution. 'For us, it's about creating efficiencies,' Mr. Yacoubi says. The mortgage application process can be tedious, involving uploading, securing and verifying documents such as employment records and taxes, collecting data on applicant credit ratings and evaluating property prices. It can also be emotionally charged. According to a recent TD Bank survey, nearly half (45 per cent) of Canadians feel stress, and 38 per cent feel anxiety surrounding the homebuying journey. That anxiety is further compounded by record levels of household debt and interest rate uncertainty as policymakers take a wait-and-see approach to the tariff impact. For some, shopping for low rates online helps relieve that pressure. According to a CMHC survey, half of Canadians are comfortable doing the entire homebuying process online. 'Banks are recognizing this and have significantly embraced online lending, whether it be consumer lending or up the chain through to business and commercial lending,' says Stephanie Owen, a partner in KPMG's management consulting practice, who's been supporting the financial services sector with digital transformation for 13 years. However, she says there are barriers for the Big Six when adopting a digital-first approach to mortgages. 'They primarily still use homegrown legacy systems, many of which don't have that scalable architecture to really support the additional digital capabilities they're looking to build out,' Ms. Owen says. 'It limits their internal agility.' With Bank of Canada data showing 60 per cent of all outstanding mortgages in Canada are coming up for renewal this year or next, Nesto is positioning itself as both an online alternative to the Big Six banks and a partner for these institutions to capture online mortgage seekers. Andrew Hamer, a partner and co-lead of Deloitte's Digital Lending group, says that while online lenders may face some demographic challenges with older generations more predisposed to non-digital challenges, the adoption hurdles are mostly embedded in how the mortgage process currently works. He says many Canadians choose their mortgage based on a recommendation from a realtor, friend, family member or financial advisor. 'These tend to be human-to-human referral relationships vs. institutional or platform relationships,' Mr. Hamer says. 'So, there is power in incumbency and many prospective borrowers who, perhaps, would be comfortable dealing with a digital lender, build trust with capable brokers and advisors.' Then there's the challenge of shadow labour, Mr. Hamer adds. 'Some digital mortgage experiences effectively - and certainly inadvertently - transfer the labour of the lender and broker or admin to the client,' he says. Mr. Hamer says digital lenders such as Nesto need to balance the borrower's desire to self-serve while still guiding them through the process. In 2024, Nesto acquired CMLS Group, one of Canada's largest mortgage financing companies, growing its combined team to more than 1,000 with offices in 10 cities across the country. With the purchase, Nesto currently manages around $70-billion in residential and commercial mortgages, up from $10-billion in mortgages in 2022. The next challenge is to woo one of the Big Six banks to use its platform. Francois Lafortune, CEO and co-founder of Diagram Ventures, which has invested in and helped develop the idea for Nesto since the beginning, believes it's just a matter of time. 'All the banks are looking at better mortgage systems… there's no off-the-shelf solution,' Mr. Lafortune says, adding that their options are to rebuild their system or invest in a solution such as Nesto Mortgage Cloud. 'The issue with rebuilding it [for large] financial institutions is it's always more costly and takes longer… by that time, the world keeps shifting," Mr. Lafortune says. Mr. Yacoubi says Nesto went from becoming the digital mortgage disruptor to looking to build a new mortgage ecosystem for the Canadian market. 'There's still a lot of work to be done,' he says, 'but we see the opportunity.'

Sponsored Content Preparing for the future: The importance of estate planning

Winnipeg Free Press

06-06-2025

Business
Winnipeg Free Press

IGM FINANCIAL INC. ANNOUNCES MAY 2025 ASSETS UNDER MANAGEMENT & ADVISEMENT AND NET FLOWS

WINNIPEG, MB , June 4, 2025 /CNW/ - IGM Financial Inc. (IGM) (TSX: IGM) today reported record high total assets under management and advisement of $278.8 billion at , up 11.0% from $251.1 billion at May 31, 2024 . Total consolidated net inflows were $190 million during May 2025 . MAY HIGHLIGHTS IGM Financial – Record high assets under management & advisement were $278.8 billion up from $269.5 billion in the prior month. Investment fund net sales were $356 million up from net redemptions of $378 million in May 2024 . Total net inflows were $190 million up from net outflows of $302 million in May 2024 . IG Wealth Management (IGWM) – Assets under advisement were $143.7 billion up from $139.1 billion in the prior month. Record high Investment fund net sales were $250 million up from net redemptions of $127 million in May 2024 . Total net inflows were $65 million up from net outflows of $2 million in May 2024 . Mackenzie Investments – Record high assets under management were $221.0 billion up from $213.7 billion in the prior month. Investment fund net sales were $106 million up from net redemptions of $251 million in May 2024 . Total net sales of $125 million up from net redemptions of $300 million in May 2024 . Table 2 – Assets under Management and Advisement ($ millions) (unaudited) May 2025 April 2025 % Change Last Month Wealth Management IG Wealth Management Assets under management 126,845 122,505 3.5 % Other assets under advisement 16,834 16,546 1.7 % Assets under advisement 143,679 139,051 3.3 % Asset management Mackenzie Investments Mutual funds 61,459 59,351 3.6 % ETFs 8,305 7,896 5.2 % Investment funds 69,764 67,247 3.7 % Institutional SMA 11,630 11,155 4.3 % Sub-advisory to Canada Life 53,741 52,039 3.3 % Total Institutional SMA 65,371 63,194 3.4 % Total third party assets under management 135,135 130,441 3.6 % Sub-advisory and AUM to Wealth Management 85,820 83,305 3.0 % Total 220,955 213,746 3.4 % ETF's distributed to third parties 8,305 7,896 5.2 % ETF's held within IGM managed products 9,761 9,092 7.4 % Total ETFs 18,066 16,988 6.4 % Total Assets under management 261,980 252,946 3.6 % Other assets under advisement 16,834 16,546 1.7 % Assets under management and advisement 278,814 269,492 3.5 % Table 3 - Average Assets under Management and Advisement ($ millions) (unaudited) Quarter to date 2025 Wealth Management IG Wealth Management Assets under management 122,859 Other assets under advisement 16,551 Assets under advisement 139,410 Asset Management Mackenzie Investments Mutual funds 59,556 ETFs 7,914 Investment funds 67,470 Institutional SMA 11,524 Sub-advisory to Canada Life 52,068 Total Institutional SMA 63,592 Total third party assets under management 131,062 Sub-advisory and AUM to Wealth Management 84,543 Total 215,605 ETFs distributed to third parties 7,914 ETFs held within IGM managed products 9,221 Total ETFs 17,135 Total Assets under management 253,921 Other assets under advisement 16,551 Assets under management and advisement 270,472 1 Excludes sub-advisory to Canada Life and the Wealth Management segment. Glossary of Terms Assets Under Management and Advisement (AUM&A) represents the consolidated AUM and AUA of IGM Financial's core businesses IG Wealth Management and Mackenzie Investments. In the Wealth Management segment, AUM is a component part of AUA. All instances where the asset management segment is providing investment management services or distributing its products through the Wealth Management segment are eliminated in our reporting such that there is no double-counting of the same client savings held at IGM Financial's core businesses. AUM&A excludes Investment Planning Counsel's (IPC's) AUM, AUA, sales, redemptions and net flows which have been disclosed as Discontinued operations. Assets Under Advisement (AUA) are the key driver of the Wealth Management segment. AUA are savings and investment products held within client accounts of our Wealth Management segment core businesses. Assets Under Management (AUM) are the key driver of the Asset Management segment. AUM are a secondary driver of revenues and expenses within the Wealth Management segment in relation to its investment management activities. AUM are client assets where we provide investment management services and include investment funds where we are the fund manager, investment advisory mandates to institutions, and other client accounts where we have discretionary portfolio management responsibilities. Mutual fund gross sales and net sales reflect the results of the mutual funds managed by the respective operating companies, and in the case of the Wealth Management segment also include other discretionary portfolio management services provided by the operating companies, including separately managed account programs. ETF's represent exchange traded funds managed by Mackenzie. Institutional SMA represents investment advisory and sub-advisory mandates to institutional investors, pension plans and foundations through separately managed accounts. Other net flows and Other assets under advisement represents financial savings products held within client accounts in the Wealth Management segment that are not invested in products or programs where these operating companies perform investment management activities. These savings products include investment funds managed by third parties, direct investment in equity and fixed income securities and deposit products. Net flows represent the total net contributions, in cash or in kind, to client accounts at the Wealth Management segment and the overall net sales to the Asset Management segment. Wealth Management – Reflects the activities of operating companies primarily focused on providing financial planning and related services to Canadian households and represents the operations of IGWM. IGWM is a retail distribution organization that serves Canadian households through their securities dealers, mutual fund dealers and other subsidiaries licensed to distribute financial products and services. The majority of the revenues of this segment are derived from providing financial advice and distributing financial products and services to Canadian households. This segment also includes the investment management activities of these organizations, including mutual fund management and discretionary portfolio management services. Asset Management – Reflects the activities of operating companies primarily focused on providing investment management services, and represents the operations of Mackenzie Investments. Investment management services are provided to a suite of investment funds that are distributed through third party dealers and financial advisors, and also through institutional advisory mandates to pension and other institutional investors. Discontinued operations - Reflects the activities of Investment Planning Counsel. On April 3, 2023 , IGM Financial announced the sale of 100% of the common shares of Investment Planning Counsel Inc. for cash consideration of $575 million . The transaction closed on November 30, 2023 . ABOUT IGM FINANCIAL INC. IGM Financial Inc. ("IGM", TSX: IGM) is a leading Canadian diversified wealth and asset management organization with approximately $279 billion in total assets under management and advisement as of May 31, 2025 . The company is committed to bettering the lives of Canadians by better planning and managing their money. To achieve this, IGM provides a broad range of financial planning and investment management services to help approximately two million Canadians meet their financial goals. IGM's activities are carried out principally through IG Wealth Management and Mackenzie Investments and are complimented by strategic positions in wealth managers Rockefeller Capital Management and Wealthsimple and asset managers ChinaAMC and Northleaf Capital. These strengthen IGM's capabilities, reach and diversification. IGM is a member of the Power Corporation group of companies. For more information, visit

Latest news with #IGWealthManagement

Thorough estate planning ‘one of the most loving things': financial planner

Thorough estate planning ‘one of the most loving things': financial planner

The Montreal fintech trying to take on Canada's mortgage giants

Sponsored Content Preparing for the future: The importance of estate planning

IGM FINANCIAL INC. ANNOUNCES MAY 2025 ASSETS UNDER MANAGEMENT & ADVISEMENT AND NET FLOWS

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