Automatic business verification for corporate accounts
How we made setting up a new Corporate account (basically) instant
Open a Corporate account faster
Wealthsimple’s Corporate investing and savings offerings have grown quickly in 2025. We are glad to meet the demand from corporate investors who are looking for a fast, easy, and low-cost way to put their corporate capital to work.
This year, we’ve made major improvements in how we onboard and enable Corporate investors. In contrast to personal investing, there is an extra level of scrutiny and risk assessment that must be done for Corporations looking to invest their capital. This is to ensure that no bad actors are impersonating a business owner for nefarious reasons. Historically, this has meant much longer onboarding times and delays, with some clients telling us it could take many weeks (or even months) to get themselves set up with other Canadian platforms.
At Wealthsimple, we’re proud to say we get 95% of accounts open in 2 weeks or less. But we’re always looking for new ways to improve and make things more efficient for time-pressed business owners looking to invest their capital.
That’s why, today, we’re taking a big step forward with automatic business verification for corporate accounts.
What is automatic business verification?
Until now, corporate owners looking to open an account would upload their information and documentation and then wait to hear back from our team. In a majority of cases, this was quick, but could still take a few business days.
To bring this wait period from a few days down to a few minutes, we’re implementing automatic business verification, a new solution that will allow same-day verification for the majority of businesses.
What this means is that some Wealthsimple clients will be able to set up their corporate accounts and start investing in one sitting, and in as little as 1 to 2 minutes.
Note: there are still some jurisdictions and ownership structures that are not eligible for automatic business verification!
How does the magic happen?
We’re making the process of opening a corporate investing account as easy as possible. As the corporate owner, you answer a few quick questions about your company, and we take care of the rest.
Using some of our proprietary algorithms, we automatically verify your corporation and its owners by searching Canadian business registries. We also perform an instant risk analysis using our own data and third-party information to get a complete picture of your corporation. This allows us to review your application and provide an instant decision. If an instant decision isn’t possible, our team will manually review your application and ask you for any additional information we might need.
No branch visits, no messy document uploads, no annoying phone calls and emails. Our goal is to eliminate all the things that would slow you down.
Limitations to automated verification
While we’d love to be able to give you instant access to every single Corporate account, there are unfortunately still some times when we can’t.
For starters, our automated process is only enabled for single-owner corporations. If you have a business partner (or several), you may still need to wait for our team to manually verify your information. A single-owner corporation is defined as a Canadian corporation where a single individual owns more than 75% of the company.
Today, automatic business verification is also only offered to corporations in specific jurisdictions, though we expect this to cover a large majority of clients. Currently these include corporations registered in:
- Ontario
- New Brunswick
- Newfoundland
- Québec
Automated business verification is also available for corporations that are registered federally.
Businesses registered in all other jurisdictions are subject to their province’s business registration offices, which are not currently set up for automated verification. In these cases, we’ll let you know what the expected ETA is, and send a notification when it’s received.
Why this is important
- Many business owners can now set up their accounts and start investing in less than five minutes, letting you spend more time running your business and less time trading paperwork with your bank
- Business owners are, well… busy! So being able to do more in one sitting is beneficial to your schedule and goals
- It’s difficult to find a fast, simple way to set up corporate accounts in Canada, and without having to leave your house or office (or both if they’re the same thing!). Our goal is always to make sure that you never have to visit a branch again.
In conclusion
Automatic business verification is a big leap forward in making corporate investing more accessible and efficient for Canadian business owners. By drastically reducing account setup times from days to mere minutes for eligible clients, we want to help busy entrepreneurs to put their capital to work faster and easier than ever before.
While the automated process currently only serves single-owner businesses in specific jurisdictions, we’re hoping to make it available to every business as soon as we can. In the meantime, we’re really proud of this first step toward making account opening easier for every Canadian business.
