Damon Murchison, president and CEO of IG Wealth Management invited me to his comfortably modest downtown Toronto office this week to talk about the dealer’s plans for this, its 99th year in business. The 54-year-old financial services veteran will mark a half-decade in the top job this September — a period dominated by the pandemic, headline-grabbing monetary policy and outsized market returns.
We sat down, one day out from the launch of U.S. President Trump’s global tariff war. His message to the more than 3,000 advisors that carry IG Wealth business cards: No bull market lasts forever.
“Something had to happen. I would personally rather it be something that’s not structural like this. But this is the volatility we expected,” he said. “Did we expect it to come in this form? No, but we’ll get by this.”
Murchison is among those executives calling for economic policy changes across Canada.
“Maybe this is exactly what we need to look inward and say ‘let’s not worry about that, let’s worry about us,'” he said. “We’re not back to the office like we should be. Number two, we’re not productive. Number three, that puts a lot of strain on the resources of the country, which is why our tax rates are so high. … We need to take care of these things.”
Murchison believes that both Ottawa and the provinces need to get more aggressive on tax reform.
“Fiscal policy has been so constrained for so long,” he said. “Imagine having a fiscal policy that loosens things up and lowers tax rates for the T4 individual in Canada, for those that are in business for themselves, so that Canadians can invest more and spend more. It’s a leap of faith, but that is where we need to get to.”
Seven priorities
IG Wealth’s strategy is to leverage technology and partnerships in its execution of seven priorities: retirement, estate, tax and legacy planning, wealth accumulation, high-net-worth clients and small- and medium-sized business advice.
The team is leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to make advisory work more efficient “pre-meeting, during the meeting and after the meeting,” Murchison said. “We’re leveraging AI across all three of those areas to make sure that we reduce the amount of time that they’re spending to plan for meetings substantially, which means they can do more meetings with more clients.”
IG Wealth struck a partnership with a fintech estate planning provider in Montreal called ClearEstate last October. Staff there help advisors build and execute client wills, create power-of-attorney documents and find a professional executor.
Murchison is also out to attract additional mass affluent and high-net-worth clients. “That is something that’s extremely important to the organization,” he said.
He isn’t ruling out acquisitions this year, but his focus continues to be on organic growth. “We’ve been built off of bringing on career changers,” he said. Under Murchison, IG Wealth’s recruitment strategy has been expanded to include financial planners at other firms.
Just like the plans his advisors build for clients, Murchison’s strategy is in the early stages of a what can fairly be described as a uniquely difficult test. “All you can deal with is what you know in terms of your circumstance, your situation and what you want to get accomplished,” he said. “The key is to always go back to the plan.”
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