Understand any stock in simple English
Enter a ticker to learn what the company does and how it makes money.
Wealthsimple Inc.
Wealthsimple is a Canadian online money manager that lets people invest, trade, and save through a phone app with low or no fees.
Wealthsimple is an online money manager: a phone app where Canadians can open an investing account, buy stocks and exchange-traded funds, and save for retirement without walking into a bank branch or talking to an advisor. It launched in 2014 as a "robo-advisor" that built a diversified portfolio for you from a short questionnaire, and that is still the heart of the business. You answer a few questions, it picks a mix of funds, and it rebalances automatically. The pitch is simple: skip the branch, skip the paperwork, and skip the fat fees that traditional banks charge to manage money.
The company makes money in a few ways. On its managed portfolios it charges a small annual fee on the money it looks after, and that fee shrinks as your balance grows. On self-directed trading it takes a cut of currency-exchange costs and charges for premium tiers; basic stock trading is free. It also offers a high-interest savings account and, after buying the small Canadian robo-advisor ShareOwner in 2020, it added a way to buy fractions of shares and whole baskets of stocks. It is now one of Canada's biggest independent online brokers, with assets in the tens of billions of dollars, competing for the same customers as the big bank-owned brokerages like Royal Bank of Canada and Toronto-Dominion Bank. What makes Wealthsimple interesting is how hard it pushes to be the "everyday" money app rather than a rich person's toy. Its basic managed portfolio has no minimum balance, so a student with fifty dollars can use the same product as a dentist with a million. It has leaned into crypto trading, which brings in younger customers and juicy exchange fees, though that business rides the wild swings of crypto prices. It has also built a robo-advisor for high-net-worth clients and a "Wealthsimple for Advisors" arm that lets independent financial advisors plug into its platform.
The company is private, backed by venture investors and a big strategic shareholder in the German insurance giant Allianz, and its founder Michael Katchen started it after building a simple spreadsheet to help his friends manage their money. It has never been a public stock. Its bet is that millions of people would rather manage their own money through a clean app than pay a bank a percentage of their savings every year — and so far, that bet has pulled in a lot of deposits.
Saved answer · last researched 10 Nov 2026