President & CEO of IG Wealth Management highlights successes from his firm's "most successful year"
Damon Murchison sees how this industry is changing, and he believes that his firm has set itself up for that change. The President & CEO of IG Wealth Management reflected on how in 2024 — his firm’s 99th year of operations — they achieved the “most successful year in [their] history.” Highlighting investments in technology, adaptations to client expectations, and a focus on service delivery, Murchison explained his firm’s success in the context of changing industry trends and highlighted his goals for the future.
Murchison noted successes in his firm’s insurance offerings, their investment shelf, and their capacity to generate alpha. He drove home, however, the firm’s focus on high net worth clients as instrumental to their overall success.
“We changed our strategy a little over eight years ago to really take what we do well and ensure that that we intersected where there's traffic in the marketplace, and that would be with a high net worth market,” Murchison says. “Because what we do is we specialize in solving complex financial issues or problems for Canadians. And the most you know, most Canadians that have the most complex challenges are high net worth. So we did a very, very good job of bringing in high net worth clients.”
Generating investment alpha and total returns via the product shelf is one part of how Murchison and his team served those clients. Insurance has played a major role, too. They’ve also added a wider range of services to better align their value proposition with those high net worth investors. That includes tax planning and optimization to help manage fiscal policy for these ideal clients.
Retirement planning has always been a standby in this industry, but Murchison notes how much more sophisticated his firm’s services in that area have become. Estate planning, too, has become one of the essential services that wealth managers offer with a view to the intergenerational wealth transfer. That also involves both legacy and philanthropy planning for those clients who want to leave gifts that go beyond their families.
Murchison notes that not only have IG advisors been working to deliver these services to clients, they’ve worked on many of the soft skills around those services. His firm has begun a program they call “high net worth financial literacy” which is meant to help wealthy Canadians explain their wealth to the next generation in a manner that creates appropriate clarity and comfort.
Delivering that broad suite of services, which demand hard and soft skills from advisors, is no mean feat. Murchison, like many other firm leaders, emphasized the importance of advisory teams in managing the burdens and wider scope that come with this sort of work.
“It used to be that you could run a very successful business, just yourself as an advisor and maybe an assistant. Those days are really over,” Murchison says.
In addition to the widening scope of work expected by more complex clients, Murchison notes the significant burdens placed by regulatory reforms on the individual advisory practice. Client focused reforms add significantly more work to an advisor’s day, and the solutions that Murchison has seen succeed tend towards delegation and investment in technology. He notes that IG Wealth Management now conducts 96 per cent of their business digitally, which helps manage many of the burdens that arise from regulatory and compliance requirements.
Managing tech investments and widening scope of work also comes with costs at both the practice and firm level. Murchison noted, though, the advantages that come with a firm of IG’s size and scale. The firm boasts just under $145 billion in assets under administration, which Murchison says gives the firm the capacity to do things that some other firms couldn’t afford to do. While investing in advisor support staff, professional accountants and lawyers, and technology Murchison says his firm has actually lowered fees by 25 per cent over the past eight years.
“We would not be able to have our best year ever in bringing on new clients, we wouldn't be able to bring on the new advisors to the firm that are joining our firm without this type of investment,” Murchison says.
Murchison says that IG has made many of these investments and improvements with an eye to the competitive landscape in Canada. He emphasizes his own belief in the power of competition and argues that Canada as a whole can often suffer from a lack of competition. The fee pressure that some firms face, he argues, has been part of the push towards a service model that is open and transparent, where clients can see value as it is demonstrated to them by their advisors.
“This country has never needed us more than they do,” Murchison says, of the whole wealth management industry. “We've got some challenges, and it's quite clear that Canadians, you know, have serious questions and they have serious challenges, and they need serious people to step up and help them and answer those questions.”
