Research for the 2025 Brokerage Report Card by Investment Executive (IE) was conducted by seven research journalists: Sangjun (John) Han, Roland Inacay, Tiana Kirton, Diane Lalonde, Ciara Lalor-Lindo, Alisha Mughal and Sai Tamanna Sharma. These researchers spoke with 658 investment advisors across Canada from 14 investment dealer firms, or brokerages.
Data was collected via telephone interviews with the advisors, held between Jan. 8 and March 3. All respondents were registered, full-time investment advisors; had worked with their firm for at least one year; and had worked in the industry for at least three years.
Advisor participants provided two ratings each for their firms’ support systems and services, across 27 categories: one rating for performance, considering how well their firm was helping them run their business and serve clients; and the other for importance, sharing how crucial each category or support area was to them personally. Both ratings were on a scale of zero to 10 — a rating of zero meant “very poor” or “unimportant,” while a rating of 10 signified “excellent” or “critically important.” Advisors were asked to provide ratings only for services and systems they had used directly.
For each firm, advisors’ ratings are aggregated into average category results across the 27 categories. A significant change requires a year over year shift by half a point or more in a firm’s category rating. This also applies to: firms’ IE ratings, the average of all of a company’s category ratings; and the overall 2025 performance and importance averages (both are a tally of all the firm ratings by advisors in a given category). The performance average benchmarks firms’ individual ratings, while the importance average indicates how important the average brokerage advisor feels a category is to their business and work.
A satisfaction gap is the difference between a category’s performance and importance ratings, where importance is higher and advisors want more support from their firms.
The Report Card series isn’t an awards program or contest, and it isn’t a ranking exercise. It doesn’t base a firm’s or advisor’s inclusion or results on sales activity, revenue or assets. The project is editorial-driven research that aggregates opinion- and experience-based data, using a rigorous methodology.
Some category names were edited for clarity, without affecting year-over-year comparisons. No categories were removed or added compared with the 2024 Report Card.
Advisors were also asked three supplemental questions, alongside anonymous questions about their business details. The three thematic queries were: 1) out of the six groups of categories included in the Report Card (for more detail and the full data, see main table), which group was most important to them personally when it came to their business and firm relationship; 2) whether their firm had, within the past year, invested in tools or technology to help them save time by automating repetitive everyday tasks; 3) whether they worked with and/or mentored — or whether they were themselves — newer, developing advisors (advisors with 10 years of experience or less, who were still building their business).
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This article appears in the June issue of Investment Executive. Subscribe to the print edition, read the digital edition or read the articles online.