Reinventing Retirement Benefits with Wealthsimple Work
The major players had a monopoly, and not everyone could play. So we changed the rules of the game — and might even have made it fun.
Let’s be honest: when it comes to retirement benefits in Canada, not much has changed since the Calgary Olympics. The same big names from the late 80s — your Sunlifes, your Manulifes — still dominate. And yet, more than three decades after Brian Orser hung up his red unitard for good, fewer than 11% of small-to-medium sized businesses in Canada have a retirement savings plan for their employees. Why is that?
Well, there are two main reasons. One is that the big players aren’t particularly interested in these smaller businesses. Despite the high fees they charge, the revenue opportunities just aren’t big enough.
The second is that it’s difficult and time-consuming for smaller companies to implement plans from the major retirement benefit providers. The task usually requires work with a broker and a very long — and, take it from people who’ve spent a lot of time recently studying this stuff, tedious — process, which gets dumped on HR departments.
Running a traditional program can take hours of admin work every week. We’ve heard horror stories of HR reps having to mail in a form any time an employee wanted to change the amount deducted from their paycheque, or needing to wire money every two weeks to make contributions. There are lots of things we miss from the 80s, but sending faxes isn’t one of them.
When we set out to create our own Group RRSP offering here at Wealthsimple the “game” the big providers were playing became clear: complex plans, features for buyers (not employees!) and partnering with brokers to keep an arm’s length from the people who were their actual clients. And we knew we could do better for Canada’s underserved small businesses.
Rather than play the same old game these big providers were playing, we decided to create a new one entirely. Maybe we could even make saving for retirement…fun?
Enter Wealthsimple Work.
New thinking for a new market
We focused on a couple of strategic principles to get customers on board with Wealthsimple Work. The first was delivering value in new and engaging ways. To copy existing retirement benefits plans feature-for-feature would be missing the point: today’s small and medium-sized businesses need more innovative solutions, ones that help them attract and retain top talent.
And so, rather than go with the same old boilerplate RRSP plans, we decided to offer things that no one else in Canada provides: like a Crypto portfolio and free access to financial coaches. Branching out in new directions allowed us to signal to smaller companies that we get it. Employees at growing companies in particular are crypto-curious and looking to have more financial agency over their investments. Our offerings allow people to partake in this exciting market in a way that’s safe and innovative, with the right guardrails in place.
Putting the real users first
The next strategic principle we focused on was creating a world-class employee experience. Our competitors cater their plans to the needs of their primary customers — corporations. We flipped the script and put the employee experience front and centre.
User-friendliness is not something you can put into a features checklist, but it really matters. Whenever our sales team pulls out a smartphone to demo Wealthsimple Work for a customer, they can almost see the lightbulb go off. (“Wealthsimple Work — It Works!” Okay, we’re still tinkering with the new slogan.) People see immediately how easy and accessible it is, and how different it is from the programs they’re used to dealing with.
Though they’re often not a part of the sales process, we identified that People Ops admins are the biggest champions of Wealthsimple Work. Our product is ideally made for companies with anywhere from 50–500 people, where there’s usually an admin running payroll every two weeks. We zeroed in on making the experience easy and straightforward for that cohort.
Don’t play by the rules, rewrite them
If there’s any wisdom we can pass along from our experience creating Wealthsimple Work, it’s this: If you’re a product team hoping to break into a crowded space, don’t try to compete in a game you’ll never win. Instead, create an entirely new one.
There will always be people left out of mainstream offerings, and finding a way to serve these segments will differentiate your value. Seek out the gaps. Providing solutions for those underserved customers — instead of trying to match a spec sheet or a checklist of best practices — can be a winning strategy.
Written by Sarah Bellstedt, in collaboration with Ian Milligan, Product Manager at Wealthsimple. Edited by Mark Adams.
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