A $298 billion GDP upside — but the AI risks flagged for wealth managers tell another story
A new report from OSFI and the Global Risk Institute lays out the AI threats facing Canada's wealth and investment industry.
The FIFAI II report, released March 23, 2026, caps a series of four workshops held between May and November 2025. More than 170 participants had a seat at the table — from banks, insurers, and asset managers to consumer advocates, universities, and government agencies including the Department of Finance Canada, the Bank of Canada, the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada, and FINTRAC.
The result is the AGILE framework: Awareness, Guardrails, Innovation, Learning, and Ecosystem Resiliency. It is designed to help financial institutions manage the risks that come with AI while still capturing the opportunity.
For anyone managing money in this country, what the report lays out deserves attention.
AI-powered trading algorithms trained on similar data may intensify market volatility, particularly on a short-term basis. If those models start moving in concert, the report warns, this could lead to procyclical shifts in financial markets during periods of stress. Equity markets and exchange-traded derivatives are identified as possible areas of vulnerability. Unregulated market participants using AI tools, the report adds, can further undermine systemic resilience.
And then there is agentic AI — systems that can act autonomously and trigger financial actions at machine speed across markets and institutions. The report notes that agents making investments on behalf of retail clients may respond simultaneously to similar data sources or market cues, amplifying short-term volatility and intensifying liquidity pressures during stress events. Corporate treasury agents could rapidly reallocate deposits in reaction to news, social-media sentiment, or shifting rate environments. During times of stress, this could potentially accelerate funding outflows and destabilize bank balance sheets.
On the consumer-facing side, AI applications in product recommendations, credit adjudication, underwriting, and investment advice are becoming more pervasive. The report makes clear that transparency, explainability, and accountability become increasingly important as these systems shape consumer outcomes. Biased or unfair outcomes arising from data limitations, it notes, may have disproportionate effects on certain populations, including seniors, newcomers, low-income individuals, and persons with limited digital access or literacy.
The talent side of the equation is not much more comforting. Citi's research from 2024 predicts that 54 percent of finance jobs face potential AI-led displacement — the highest percentage among major industries. The International Monetary Fund, also in 2024, estimates that 60 percent of jobs in advanced economies will be affected by AI automation. The report warns that displacement could occur faster than workforce retraining, creating a critical transition period.
Then there is the concentration problem. Financial institutions increasingly depend on a small set of external technology providers for data, models, cloud infrastructure, and AI-enabled services. The July 2024 CrowdStrike outage, which resulted in an estimated financial loss of $5.4 billion for the Fortune 500 (excluding Microsoft), is a case in point for what single points of failure can do at a systemic level.
The AGILE framework sets out priorities on two tracks. In the near term, it calls for strengthening executive and board-level awareness of AI risks, reinforcing governance and controls around cyber hygiene and third-party due diligence, encouraging responsible AI-driven innovation supported by sandboxes and outcome-based supervision, establishing financial industry AI literacy and upskilling initiatives, and pursuing greater regulatory certainty by clarifying how existing rules apply to AI.
Over the medium term, the framework pushes for expanded stress testing that incorporates AI-driven macroeconomic scenarios, adaptable governance frameworks with consumer-centric disclosures and explainable AI decisions, modernized legacy systems with standardized data and zero-trust security, and stronger information-sharing frameworks and joint intelligence efforts.
The report does come with a caveat. It reflects views from individual FIFAI II speakers and participants, and should not be interpreted as guidance from OSFI, the Bank of Canada, or any other regulatory authority.
That said, one conclusion from the workshops is hard to walk past: the greatest risk of AI is failing to act decisively. Canada's financial sector creates seven to eight percent of the nation's GDP and employs almost 850,000 Canadians. The report projects that continued AI deployment could add $298 billion in cumulative GDP from 2025 to 2035 and generate an average of 41,500 new jobs annually.
For wealth managers and investment professionals, the takeaway is not subtle. The FIFAI II report positions responsible AI adoption as both a competitive and defensive imperative — and one the industry will need to reckon with sooner rather than later.
