Prediction markets are coming to Canada

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 21:00:00 -0400

Wealthsimple is a fintech company at the forefront of a lot of innovation in Canada’s personal finance sector since the company’s founding in 2014. Notably, Wealthsimple was the first broker in Canada to offer zero-commission trades, back in 2019. In 2020, they started offering the ability to trade crypto. In 2025, they launched zero-commission options trading. This year, the company received regulatory approval to bring prediction trading to Canada.

Unlike in other parts of the world, prediction markets have not flourished in Canada and have been considered basically illegal since a 2017 ruling from Canada’s federal securities regulator. Wealthsimple has been able to get around this ruling by only offering contracts on a narrow set of questions:

Despite a 2017 ruling that largely banned these kinds of short-term, yes-or-no contracts, certain regulated firms that are CIRO members are able to offer certain types of “event contracts,” […] The approval for Ontario-based Wealthsimple permits it only to offer contracts tied to economic indicators, financial markets and climate trends, the company confirmed – not sports or elections, which are among the most popular uses of prediction markets in the United States.

Wealthsimple has driven innovation in the Canadian personal finance sector; however, their new product offerings over the last few years seem to be speedrunning the Robinhood trajectory toward high-risk, high-volatility trading and away from their traditional niche of broad, diversified funds/ETFs for ordinary people to set-and-forget. This pivot can be understood as part of a broader trend toward the casinofication of everything, which took off with crypto and the legalization of online sports betting.

Open banking comes to Canada

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 22:03:00 -0400

Canada’s banking sector is legendarily stable. However, this stability comes at the cost of innovation. Canada lags behind peers such as the EU, UK, US, and Australia in an area I care a lot about: open banking.

The premise of open banking is that consumers should be free to share their financial data with the third parties of their choosing, such as a budgeting app.. I have been following open banking in Canada for years now, ever since I started closing tracking my own finances. For a long time, I have been looking for a better way to export transactions than logging into my bank’s website and manually downloading a CSV file representing a certain time range.

Over the years, people have tried to solve this problem by writing third-party packages to retrieve data from specific banks. However, these packages were fragile and prone to breaking, and they usually relied on you providing your full account credentials, granting them to ability to impersonate a login to your account. Shockingly, this is actually the default security model for Canadian fintech companies: even a humble budget app must be given your username, password, and (implicitly) the ability to take any action on your behalf. Needless to say, this is at best a grey zone for liability, since you are willingly handing over the keys to the kingdom to a third party.

Personal Finance on Big Muddy

Prediction markets are coming to Canada

Open banking comes to Canada