Following two consultations, the Canadian Investment Regulatory Organization (CIRO) has published new guidance for order-execution-only (OEO) dealers, broadening the range of decision-making supports the dealers can provide to clients while still refraining from making recommendations.
The guidance gives OEO dealers flexibility to innovate and better serve clients, and empowers do-it-yourself (DIY) investors to make informed decisions, the self-regulatory organization said in a release on Thursday.
Updating the previous OEO guidance was a 2026 priority for CIRO, to help enable greater access to regulated advice — particularly as the proportion of DIY investors grows alongside unregulated advice online.
The new guidance “enables dealer members to provide more decision‑making supports, including timely, relevant educational resources, notifications and alerts tailored to client needs,” Alexandra Williams, CIRO’s senior vice-president of strategy, innovation and stakeholder protection, said in the release. “For investors, it means access to high‑quality tools from reputable, regulated sources to ultimately enhance their protection.”
The principles-based guidance clarifies that OEO dealers can provide informational resources and decision-making supports — such as alerts, notifications and sample portfolios — to clients as long as the dealers don’t “endorse a specific investment decision” and as long as they provide adequate safeguards. Safeguards could include disclosures in plain language or monitoring of client outcomes.
The previous guidance had restricted OEO dealers from providing communications that could “reasonably be expected to influence” investors. This previous “broad language” raised concern that factual statements could be captured if they happened to influence a client, the regulator says in a summary of the guidance.
Alerts and notifications, for example, “will not be considered prohibited recommendations … where they contain only factual information with nothing that a reasonable client might regard as an endorsement of a specific investment decision,” the guidance says.
At the same time, OEO dealers should mitigate the risk that an alert or notification could be understood by a client to be a personalized recommendation. That means using general language and providing clear disclosure, as the guidance outlines.
The guidance is explicit that OEO dealers can make sample portfolios available to clients that set out generic asset allocations and can also provide related filtering tools, subject to applicable requirements and safeguards. Clients can then select the specific securities to fill in the asset allocations.
“In this set-up, the OEO dealer has not endorsed any specific investment product as the client is still fundamentally required to make their own investment decisions to fulfil specific positions,” the guidance summary says. “Therefore, the sample portfolio is not a prohibited recommendation.”
The guidance warns against repeated alerts or notifications and promotional statements, which could create the impression of an endorsement and place OEO dealers in a position offside of regulations.
“Further, any promotional statements in the OEO channel regarding any proprietary or affiliate products would generally always amount to a material conflict of interest that must be avoided,” the guidance says.
The guidance is illustrative and not exhaustive, recognizing that the OEO segment of the industry is evolving.
Investor advocates have been concerned that OEO channels can enable or even incentivize risky investment behaviour and decisions. CIRO says it will publish a report this summer with behavioural research findings related to the impact of decision-making supports on high-risk investment strategies.