Canada — n = 54
Finding an advisor in Canada
What the 54 pages we walked in Canada look like on the six, and how each business model here compares with itself in the other countries. The firm-by-firm findings live on the business-model pages.
What Canada looks like on the six
Mean 3.83 of six across 54 pages.
Can you see a real person at all?
87%
47 of 54
47 of 54 show a named advisor somewhere on the page without asking for a form first. On the other 7, a visitor never sees an individual at all.
Can you narrow by what you need?
37%
20 of 54
20 of 54 offer a control for specialty, credentials, or how an advisor is paid. On the other 34, location is the only thing a visitor can narrow by, or there is nothing to narrow by at all.
Can you narrow by who fits you?
41%
22 of 54
22 of 54 offer a control for the language a visitor speaks, the community they belong to, or the life event they are facing. On the other 32, who the visitor is makes no difference to who they are shown.
Can you reach them yourself?
80%
43 of 54
43 of 54 give a visitor that named advisor’s own phone, email, or calendar without submitting their details to the firm first. The other 11 do not.
Can you keep your details until you choose?
80%
43 of 54
43 of 54 let a visitor reach the advisor they picked without joining a queue, asking for a callback, or filling in a match form. On the other 11, the route runs through the firm.
Can a machine find them?
59%
32 of 54
32 of 54 put their advisors in the served bytes, where a crawler or an answer engine can read them. On the other 22, the advisors are invisible to machines.
Canada leads, and the reason is instructive.
22 of the 54 Canadian surfaces — one in three — offer a
language control, the highest rate anywhere in this study and a plausible consequence of
official bilingualism. In the United States it is 20 of 255, fewer
than one in twelve.
But offering a control and shipping one are different things, and Canada
does both. Where we drove the French/English toggle directly, some narrowed a real
list of named people and some translated the page around an unchanged roster. Two large
institutions ship a language filter the consumer can select and the page never transmits
— driven against the backend directly it narrows perfectly, while the front end sends
language=ENGLISH with the dropdown reading French. One Canadian surface
offers 27 named languages as checkboxes, the most complete language control we saw anywhere,
and the roster is identical whichever are ticked.
So the count above is of controls offered, which is not the same as controls that work: 3 in this study are shipped, selectable, and demonstrably narrow nothing at all. A language control is the one place where the difference between the two is easy to see and easy to miss.
8 of the 54 pass all six. 7 pass none.
On 7 of them no named advisor appears at any depth. A visitor who arrives wanting to choose a person never gets to the point of choosing.
17 hand a visitor a named advisor they were given no way to choose — the connection works and the matching never happened. That is the study’s central finding, and it holds here.
22 advertise a way to narrow by language. Whether each one works is a separate question, and this study answers it separately: several ship a language control the page never transmits.
Business model separates these surfaces more than anything else does. Banks and credit unions here average 4.5 of six across 20 surfaces; insurance carriers average 2.7 across 10. Both are in the same market, under the same regulator, serving the same consumer.
By business model
The same business model, read against itself in each country
A bank is not a wirehouse and a wirehouse is not a lead marketplace, so a country mean on its own hides more than it shows. Every row here opens the full firm-by-firm finding for that business model.
| Business model | Surfaces | Mean of six | Median | Elsewhere |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Banks & credit unionssee all 20 | 20 | 4.5 | 5 | US 3.1ZA 0 |
| Broker-dealers, IBDs & platformssee all 17 | 17 | 3.59 | 4 | US 3.2 |
| Insurance carrierssee all 10 | 10 | 2.7 | 3 | US 2.52ZA 0.69 |
Every one of the 54 Canada pages is listed in full, with its controls, its transcript and the URL we audited, on its business-model page. Each appears exactly once in this report.
Looking for one firm?
This page is the country read. To find a named firm, search it on the index — every Canada page is in there — or open the business model it belongs to in the table above.
Every part of this report
By business model