What can beginner investors expect from your firm?

New investors can access an award-winning online investing platform, robust mobile-trading capabilities and unrivalled customer service. Qtrade Investor has consistently been ranked among the top online brokerages across all major rankings, including The Globe and Mail, Surviscor and MoneySense. We have achieved 22 first-place wins for best online brokerage over the past 15 years, and eight first-place awards in customer service experience over the past five years.

We empower beginner investors with online resources and innovative tools that help them invest with confidence. Just launched in 2020, Portfolio Simulator™ lets clients test investment scenarios in a simulator mode, to explore ideas and fine-tune their investment strategy, while Portfolio Score™ provides a second opinion on their portfolio, helping investors understand their diversification and risk exposure and grading the selected securities across five key dimensions. If a beginner investor is looking to build an ETF portfolio, with just a short series of questions, Portfolio Creator™ generates a portfolio, customized to their investing preferences, that will help them maximize risk-adjusted returns.

What can active investors expect from your firm?

Qtrade Investor offers the Investor Plus program, an enhanced service for active traders with larger portfolios. Investor Plus includes discounted trading fees, no fees on US-dollar registered accounts and reduced margin borrowing rates. Active traders will also enjoy the benefits of Qtrade Investor’s robust, stable trading platform, mobile-trading capabilities and award-winning customer support.

What online investing trends do you expect to matter to DIY investors?

Long before the pandemic, investors were making the shift to online platforms and, more specifically, mobile apps. This is a trend that has accelerated over time and shows no sign of slowing. We expect that Canadian do-it-yourself investors will continue to demand more-robust mobile apps to research, trade, view and make transactions in their portfolios.

Investors also require more self-service capabilities in their online brokerage, with goal-planning tools that help them assess their investment choices. Managing risk in a historically volatile market requires an online brokerage platform that provides investors with the tools to analyze their portfolio performance. We think we’ll see industry participants launch more tools for performance and risk measurement at the individual portfolio level.

Open banking is also on the horizon, and Canadian consumers can expect to see the emergence of aggregator tools that give them a full view of all their active accounts, no matter what financial institution(s) they’re with. We’ll also likely see more incentive offers, particularly during high investment seasons, as firms attempt to attract a younger demographic.

What does user experience mean at your firm?

At Qtrade Investor, we’re obsessed with the user experience; our clients and partners are at the heart of everything we do. It’s this obsession that drives us to answer calls in half the time of our nearest competitor (Surviscor’s “The State of Financial Customer Service in Canada,” 2020), and it’s the reason we’ve won eight awards for customer service

And when we built our leading-edge portfolio analytics tools, we didn’t simply patch on a widget that would require clients to input portfolio data to use it. We integrated it within our platform, so your portfolio data is populated and automatically updated directly into the tool. It’s a simpler, more seamless way for clients to use analytics tools to build a portfolio, assess risk and maximize their returns.

What sets your firm apart from your peers?

What makes us different is our focus on the client experience. It’s not just words to us, and the proof is in our long history of industry honours. In addition to 22 awards over the past 15 years for best online brokerage across all major rankings, including The Globe and Mail, Surviscor and MoneySense, we’ve won an additional eight first-place awards in customer service experience over the past five years.

“No other broker is good in so many different areas and no other broker makes such consistent year-by-year improvements,” said Rob Carrick, personal finance columnist for The Globe and Mail, in his review of Qtrade Investor. “What impresses about Qtrade is its attention to details in supplying almost all the features investors need to be successful.”

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® Qtrade and VirtualWealth are registered trademarks of Aviso Wealth Inc.
Online brokerage services are offered through Qtrade Investor, a division of Credential Qtrade Securities Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Aviso Wealth Inc. VirtualWealth is a division of Credential Qtrade Securities Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Aviso Wealth Inc. and Member of the Canadian Investor Protection Fund.
™ Portfolio Score, ™ Portfolio Simulator and ™ Portfolio Creator are trademarks of Credential Qtrade Securities Inc.

This Q&A was featured in the Look Back / Look Ahead magazine.