IG Wealth and Hub International's leadership picks signal broader shift in wealth management priorities
IG Wealth Management hired Sandra DeMontigny as its new Head of Wealth Planning last week. Hub International Technology announced three senior roles two days later. HomeEquity Bank brought on a portfolio strategy director. The Big Six asset management arms are reshuffling VP ranks. Taken individually, these moves look like ordinary churn. Taken together, they map a structural shift happening across Canadian wealth management: firms are hiring operational leadership, not just portfolio talent.
Advice architecture over asset gathering
For decades, wealth firms built their executive tier around portfolio managers and capital markets specialists. The revenue model assumed that clients came for access to securities, and service followed. That framing is reversing. IG Wealth's hire is a planning executive, not an investment one. Her role oversees the delivery of tax strategies, estate structures, and cash-flow modeling — the work that happens before a dollar moves into a fund. Hub International's three senior picks span client onboarding systems, compliance workflow, and advisor training infrastructure. None of them run portfolios.
This isn't branding. It's a response to margin pressure. Retail mutual fund fees have compressed by roughly 40 basis points on average since 2019 under regulatory scrutiny from CIRO. Firms that relied on product manufacturing for revenue discovered that the economics no longer cover the cost of the advisor network beneath them. The profitable client now is the one who pays directly for advice, not indirectly through embedded fund fees. Building that client base requires standardized planning processes, digital intake systems that don't collapse under advisor workload, and compliance infrastructure that scales without adding bodies. Those are operations problems, not investment problems.
The retention equation flips
HomeEquity Bank's addition of a portfolio strategy director reflects a different pressure. Reverse mortgage portfolios in Canada now exceed $7 billion. The business model used to prioritize acquisition — sign borrowers, book the loan, move to the next file. But in a variable-rate environment where some borrowers locked in at 3.5% are now accruing at 7%, portfolio management is no longer back-office cleanup. It's the job. Keeping a 74-year-old borrower stable for another decade requires proactive reviews, rate renegotiations when possible, and coordination with estate trustees before the home sale becomes forced. That's relationship management at scale, not origination volume.
The executive hire signals that retention is now a revenue driver, not a cost center. When borrowers stay in the portfolio longer, the interest income compounds. When they churn early due to poor service or rate shock, the acquisition cost was wasted. Firms across the industry are hiring leaders whose job is not to bring in new clients but to keep existing ones from walking. That's operationally harder than it sounds. It requires CRM infrastructure that flags at-risk accounts before they move, service protocols that don't require the client to chase down answers, and staff training that rewards depth over speed.
The independence premium narrows
The movement of talent from the Big Six to firms like IG Wealth used to signal that independents could outbid on compensation. That's still true, but it's no longer the main draw. Hybrid work policies matter. IG Wealth and Hub International both offer remote-first structures that let executives live in Ottawa or Calgary while managing national teams. TD Asset Management and RBC Global Asset Management still require physical presence in Toronto four days a week. For a VP-level hire with school-age children, the flexibility premium is worth more than a 15% pay bump.
The Big Six retain scale advantages in capital, brand, and cross-sell opportunities. But their operational rigidity is now a recruiting liability. Smaller firms are hiring executives the banks would have locked up five years ago, not by overpaying but by designing roles that assume distributed teams and async workflows. The shift doesn't redistribute all the talent, but it redistributes enough to matter.
