Tina Tehranchian was presented with this top industry honour at last night’s WP Awards ceremony
In 1990 a young immigrant arrived to Canada from Iran, hoping to pursue a career in communications and media. In 2026, she was presented with the FP Canada Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Financial Planning Industry at the Wealth Professional Awards. Tina Tehranchian, now a senior wealth advisor at CI Assante Wealth Management Ltd, did not have a straightforward journey journey from point A to point B. But, along the way she focused on philanthropy, on her clients, and her community. That contribution to others defined her award-winning career.
“I arrived with very few connections and pretty much no roadmap for building a career in financial planning,” Tehranchian says. “Receiving this award is both humbling and deeply meaningful for me, but what I’m most proud of is not the awards or the milestones along the way, it’s the trust that clients placed in me over the decades and the privilege of helping families navigate important life transitions, achieve their goals, and create lasting legacies.”
When Tehranchian came to Canada in 1990, she walked off the plane into a recession. Her chosen field of communications and media wasn’t hiring, and she was forced to look at the professions that were. She took a job with Sun Life, working with clients on the life insurance side of the business. She told herself that she’d hold down the job through the recession and when the economy improved, she’d make the leap into communications.
What she found was a male-dominated industry, with a low success rate, and a high degree of churn. She also found a chance to help people. Tehranchian noticed from the outset that she was making a positive impact on the lives of her clients. She saw a chance to help people. She stuck through all the challenges she found in this career, like a lack of mentorship opportunities and a dearth of other women to support her, because she found a way to be of service.
Tehranchian’s experience as an immigrant further crystalized that commitment to service. While she spent her first years in Canada too focused on finding a place for herself and her family to devote her time to philanthropy, she started to engage with immigrant causes in the early 2000s. She joined a non-profit committee on immigration which had found that many new immigrants to Canada were unable to find jobs in their areas of expertise. They were forced into temporary, precarious employment situations and they would fall behind. This led her to found and chair a new volunteer organization which worked to mentor other Iranian-Canadian immigrants, helping them to find pathways to careers in their profession. Many of those immigrants, Tehranchian says, were highly educated engineers and IT professionals. That non-profit helped them turn their foreign education into Canadian success.
Just as she was becoming more successful as an advisor, Tehranchian’s experience with this philanthropic work gave her a new avenue to make a positive impact. That role led to others with different charities and causes. Before long she began to find ways to connect her work as an advisor to her work with charities.
One of the defining aspects of Tehranchian’s advisor practice is her expertise in philanthropy planning and charitable giving. It’s work that weaves together financial and tax planning with a knowledge of the charitable landscape. She connects her clients with the causes that matter most to them and gives them structured ways to make a meaningful and growing impact. She is one of the pioneers of philanthropy planning in Canada, work that has become an increasingly vital subset of what financial planners do every day for clients. It’s work that also contributed to another major form of recognition for Tehranchian: her membership in the Order of Canada.
The lifetime achievement award she won last night was explicitly for her work advancing the profession of financial planning in Canada. A longstanding media ambassador for FP Canada, Tehranchian believes she has contributed to the profession in a host of meaningful ways. Her work as a philanthropy planner stands out, as do her written works, media appearances, and expert contributions to seminars. She hopes that she hasn’t just advanced planning as a profession, but that her work as a planner has helped the profession contribute to Canadian society at large. It’s that powerful narrative of an immigrant turning her success despite adversity into positive social impact that helped earn her this lifetime achievement award.
“I’m very grateful to the judges for having selected me because basically, I don’t fit the mold of most winners of this kind of award. I’m an immigrant. I’m a woman. I come from a different culture completely. And the fact that I’ve been able to make it in this industry, I think it’s great motivation for young advisors who are just starting out and maybe coming from many different diverse backgrounds,” Tehranchian says. “The greatest privilege of my career has been helping clients not only build wealth, but use it in ways that support their families, strengthen their communities, and create lasting legacies. If my journey inspires other advisors, I hope it reminds them that our profession is ultimately about serving people, building trust, and making a positive difference in the lives of others and in our communities.”
