Mike Katchen built Canada’s largest fintech without shortcuts. Here are the insights he shared with us at CIX Summit 2026.
When Mike Katchen took the stage at CIX Summit 2026 to accept the Innovator of the Year award, he shared that it was a full-circle moment. The last time he stood at that podium was in 2014, the year Wealthsimple launched. CIX had noted it as a “Top 20 Hottest Innovative Companies.” Twelve years later, Wealthsimple had just closed a $750 million round at a $10 billion valuation — one of the largest tech financings in Canadian history — and crossed $100 billion in assets under administration.
In a wide-ranging fireside chat with CPP Investments’ Max Miller, Katchen was candid about what actually drove that growth: a set of principles, applied consistently, over a very long time.
Here’s what founders and operators can take away from his journey.
1. Trust is your product — and it takes years to compound
Wealthsimple is not, at its core, a technology company. It’s a trust company that uses technology.
“We sell trust,” Katchen said. “We ask people to trust us with their life savings. It is an enormous ask.”
In the early days, that ask was challenging. Katchen described the cycle: he’d tell people about this great new investing product, they’d seem interested, and then they’d ask how many clients he had. “It was really awful when the answer was, well if you sign up we’ll have one.”
Trust doesn’t respond to marketing spend or product launches. It builds slowly, through consistent delivery, over years. Wealthsimple took ten years to reach $50 billion in assets-under-administration — then doubled that in one. “I think we’re just at the very early stages still of building this compounding machine,” Katchen said.
For founders, the implication is uncomfortable: you can’t rush the trust-building phase. You just have to do the work and wait for it to compound.
2. Raise capital when you don’t need it
Wealthsimple was profitable and growing fast when it went to market for its $750 million round. That was deliberate.
“It wasn’t a necessity to raise capital,” Katchen explained. “But we saw an opportunity to bring on partners that we thought would help us succeed in this next phase of growth, and put us in a position to be incredibly ambitious.”
The investor mix mattered too. CPP Investments wasn’t just a cheque, it was a mission alignment Katchen found genuinely unique. “It’s rare when you can actually say you share a purpose with your investor. CPPIB is really about helping Canadians with their retirements and have a financially secure retirement, and we have a very similar mission at helping Canadians achieve financial freedom.”
Raising from a position of strength gave Wealthsimple the leverage to be selective and strategic about who came in. Founders who wait until they need capital give that leverage away.
3. The path to $1 trillion starts with removing friction
Katchen’s stated goal is $1 trillion in AUA by 2034 — ten times where Wealthsimple is today. When asked what has to be true for that to happen, he didn’t talk about market conditions or interest rates. He talked about friction.
“We are obsessed with delivering something that our clients really want and need and makes their lives easier. We constantly are looking to take more and more friction out of investing and banking.”
The examples he gave were specific and unglamorous: a new capability for people to deposit cash via Canada Post outlets because some clients needed to know they could deposit cash to their Wealthsimple accounts, even if they rarely would. Becoming only the second fintech globally to join SWIFT, because small business clients needed faster and cheaper wire payments. Launching no-fee, high-interest chequing accounts. Adding small business banking.
None of these were moonshots. They were responses to real client needs, stacked on top of each other over time. “We listen to our clients and hear what they want, and that’s kind of the thing that has guided us in our roadmap ever since starting.”
The lesson: the gap between a good product and one people actually switch to is almost always friction. Find it and remove it, one piece at a time.
4. Treat AI as a literacy problem
One of the most striking parts of the conversation was Katchen’s description of how Wealthsimple has approached AI internally — not as a product bet, but as an organizational capability to build.
“We felt very early that our approach to this was [that] AI is a superpower and we want everybody in the company to become AI-literate as quickly as possible.”
That meant showcasing examples from the most advanced internal users, making tools available broadly, and running programs specifically designed to bring in AI-native talent.
The internal infrastructure they’ve built — an internal tool called Magic that lets anyone spin up an app and share it via URL — has unleashed a wave of product prototypes from across the organization. Clients are submitting feature ideas not as emails, but as working prototypes built with Claude. “How incredible is that?” Katchen said.
The takeaway for founders: don’t treat AI as something your product team owns. It’s an organizational capability, and the companies that spread it widest will compound the fastest.
5. The technical co-founder challenge is going away
This was perhaps the most pointed thing Katchen said, and it landed.
“I have certainly over the last number of years met so many people who come to me and say, ‘Mike, I’d love to build a business. I want to build a software technology startup, but if only I had a technical co-founder I would do it, I would quit my job tomorrow, but I just can’t find that technical co-founder.’ That problem is going away.”
With AI, anyone with curiosity and drive can build a first version of a product. It might not scale to infinity, but the barrier that held back a generation of would-be founders is collapsing.
For anyone sitting on an idea, waiting for the right technical partner to appear: the moment Katchen is describing may already be here.
6. The hardest part is taking the first step
Katchen’s advice to aspiring Canadian entrepreneurs is worth repeating in full.
“Go for it. I believe that the hardest part of starting a business is taking that first step. No one knows what they’re doing, no one knows where it’s going to go or where it’s going to end up. When I was here [at CIX] ten years ago, I had a naive dream that we could do something really interesting and help people invest. I didn’t come from the industry, I was 24 or 25 years old.”
He described the engine of early-stage progress not as brilliance or perfect strategy, but as resourcefulness, the ability to keep making progress and building momentum, day after day.
“I think we in Canada desperately need more entrepreneurs. So please get at it.”
Mike Katchen was celebrated as the 2026 CIX Innovator of the Year at CIX Summit, powered by Elevate, on March 25, 2026 in Toronto.
