The Canadian Investment Regulatory Organization (CIRO) is revising its fee model to reflect the added costs of taking over registration from the provincial regulators. It plans to hike the annual fee it charges firms per rep — a change that will fall primarily on fund dealers with large headcounts.
In a bulletin, the self-regulatory organization (SRO) said that it is proposing to revise the rep component of dealers’ annual fees by raising the per-rep fee it charges firms from $250 to $300, starting on April 1, 2026 (the beginning of its 2027 fiscal year).
The higher fee will offset the fact that CIRO will no longer be collecting registration fees through the National Registration Database (NRD), and will be ending the current cost recovery arrangements that it has with certain provincial regulators — those revenues totalled $1.9 million in fiscal 2025.
At the same time, the SRO is facing higher costs driven by its expanded responsibility for registration, since the provinces began delegating more of this work to the SRO this year.
According to the bulletin, this includes the cost of carrying out domestic and international criminal, bankruptcy and insolvency checks, staffing and related IT support — which it estimates represents approximately $4.6 million in annual incremental cost.
In fiscal 2026, the SRO used $2 million from its reserves to fund the added costs. But for fiscal 2027 it’s planning to shift to financing those added costs from higher dealer fees.
And, since the costs of registration are most directly driven by the number of reps that need to be registered, the SRO is seeking to increase the rep-based fee component of dealers’ annual fees.
Overall, dealer fees will increase by 5% as a result, with most of the increase falling on fund dealers, as they have more reps on average than investment dealers. Fund dealers account for about two thirds of the reps that CIRO oversees.
Smaller investment dealers and fund dealers won’t be materially impacted by the change in fee structure, the SRO said. In fact, smaller investment dealers may see overall fees decline due to the end of NRD fees. Whereas large fund dealers will bear an estimated 68% of the fee hike.
The proposal is out for comment until Nov. 7.