Personal Finances in Canada
Our finances have a big inpact on our lives. Money, we all want it. We all need it. These pages will give you all the information you need about the Canadian Financial Institutions.
The banking industry in Canada includes 21 domestic banks, 23 foreign bank subsidiaries and 22 foreign bank branches operating in Canada. In total, these institutions manage almost $1.8 trillion in assets.
Canada's finance institutions offer a wide spectrum of financial services to individuals and business. Canada’s financial services sector is highly competitive. This increasing competitiveness has attributable to several developments.
Many of the old barriers prohibiting financial institutions from competing in each other’s business have disappeared over the past 15 years.
For example, any Canadian life insurance company may now own a bank, a bank may own an investment dealer or a mutual fund company,etc.
More recent changes to federal law and regulation have opened up new opportunities for foreign banks to operate in Canada, encouraged the start up of new banks with new ownership rules, and given certain non-bank finance institutions direct access to the payments system.
Innovations in technology have enabled financial institutions to offer more products and services in new ways and have triggered the emergence of new types of competitors, such as monoline credit card issuers MBNA Canada and Capital One Bank.
While Canadian banks are leading players in the country’s finance services sector, there are several thousand other financial services providers in Canada, making for a varied and dynamic marketplace.
This means a growing amount of products and services are available, at costs ranked among the most competitive in the world.
