The Answer Already Exists
A full-page ad ran in the Globe and Mail listing twenty-two fees charged by Canada's five biggest banks against the corresponding zero at Wealthsimple. No headline claim beyond the fact list itself. Twenty-two numbered lines, one column dark, one light, and a two-word close: banking is over.
Picture the person whose job it is to answer that ad. Say you run marketing at one of the big five banks and this lands on your desk on a Friday morning. What do you actually do with it? You could write back that Wealthsimple doesn't carry the same deposit insurance obligations, or that a company with a few million customers isn't managing the same risk as an institution holding a hundred and fifty years of mortgages. Both of those things are true. Neither one changes the fact sitting in the fourth line of the ad: the $4 monthly fee is real, and no good copy, if ever approved, makes it stop being real.
The $4 monthly fee, the $65 unlimited-transaction business account, the 21 per cent overdraft rate -> nobody in marketing set those numbers, and no clever line of copy undoes them. They come from decisions nobody in a comms meeting was ever in the room for: branch networks that cost billions a year to keep open, computer systems built when nobody had heard the word fintech, capital rules that treat a deposit-taking bank differently than they treat Wealthsimple, and fee income that has spent years quietly paying for other parts of the business. The team asked to respond to the ad had no part in creating the thing the ad is about.
Which is what made me go back and check something.
The banks already worked this out once, years ago. Tangerine exists because Scotiabank decided, at some point, that its main brand could never honestly claim to have no fees, so it built a different bank, gave it a different name, and let that one make the claim instead. CIBC did the same thing and called it Simplii. PC Financial did it before either of them. The answer to this week's ad was worked out inside these banks more than ten years ago. It already has a name, a banking licence, and an app people can download today.
What it never had was enough money or enough belief behind it to actually go after this fight. Were those low-fee banks actually built to beat a company like Wealthsimple, or were they were built so that if a journalist or a regulator ever asked what the bank offered someone who didn't want to pay fees, there was an answer on file? Was enough put behind them to take real customers away from the bank sitting right beside them?
Scotiabank has Tangerine.
CIBC has Simplii.
Both of them could run this exact ad tomorrow, line for line, using their own no-fee accounts as the second column. Neither one does. Two of Canada's biggest banks are already holding the answer to Wealthsimple's ad, and every day they choose not to spend the money it would take to say so.
K Baksh