Tech roundup: Manulife adds three new AI wealth tools

After seeing two of its AI tools boost productivity south of the border, Manulife Wealth and Asset Management says it’s planning to roll out the tools here in Canada.

The global investment, financial advice and retirement services segment of Manulife Financial Corp. said its U.S. retirement and retail sales AI tools, implemented since last year, have increased contact rates and helped close deals.

Manulife plans to bring both AI tools to Canada in the third quarter of this year, said Robi Krempus, head of AI at Manulife Wealth and Asset Management.

The U.S. retirement tool, launched in March 2025, has generated 2,000 opportunities, closing 390 deals, the firm said. It also claimed that sales staff spent 80% less time looking up information while preparing for a call.

The retirement AI tool helps Manulife John Hancock Retirement’s sales and service team customize their message before reaching out to advisors or group plan sponsors. It analyzes information like the number of days since the last meeting and the advisor’s book of business to generate recommendations.

Meanwhile, the U.S. internal sales team saw a 40% increase in its contact rate with the retail AI tool, which helps with pre-meeting preparation, product opportunity and client engagement signals.

The AI knows advisor team structures, product details and which products are available on what platform, Krempus added. Firms like Raymond James and Edward Jones work differently than Morgan Stanley or UBS, so a Manulife salesperson gets a more informed perspective before they walk into a wholesale meeting.

The two AI tools would be the latest addition to Manulife Wealth and Asset Management’s AI technology suite in Canada. They would join a compliance tool, launched in the third quarter of 2025, to help answer advisors’ questions around compliance policy and procedure.

The firm claimed that 42% of advisors using the compliance tool have reported saving up to 15 minutes per inquiry, while another 29% said it saved them between 15 and 30 minutes.

“Compliance and legal language is actually quite structured and rational,” Krempus said. “When you think about large language models, they tend to perform really well when the sentences are rational and well understood.”

Contrast this to notes in a customer relationship management software where each advisor has their own shorthand and style of incomplete sentences, Krempus added. “That’s where the model tends to struggle but performs well with legal and compliance language.”

RBC grows Vancouver tech hub

RBC is expanding its Vancouver banking and innovation hub from its current 350 employees to 600 by the end of the year, the bank announced May 29.

The location opened in November 2025, with roles in RBC’s technology and commercial banking segments. It expects the hub to expand to 1,000 workers by 2029, with 440 of them being net new positions.

The expanded hub will include specialists in AI, machine learning, cybersecurity and data science, along with additional positions in RBC’s Borealis team in Vancouver. Last year, Borealis — the bank’s in-house research institute — trained its Asynchronous Temporal Model on billions of client transactions to provide banking insights.

In February, RBC appointed Bruce Ross as the inaugural head of its new AI group. He seeks out opportunities to use and develop AI tools across the bank’s five business segments.

“Transformation is defined by two variables: the quality and scale of the people you commit to it, and the money you put behind it,” Ross said in an interview at the time.

Ross claimed that RBC Lumina, its internal enterprise data and AI platform, is built on Canada’s largest private sector graphics processing unit farm for AI training — second only to the federal government.

3iQ uses U.S. crypto bank as custodian

Toronto-based crypto-asset investment firm 3iQ says it plans to use federally-regulated U.S. crypto bank Anchorage Digital as its custody and infrastructure partner for its Canadian investment products.

3iQ intends to migrate a significant portion of its assets under management from six TSX-traded products to Anchorage Digital, the firm said in a May 20 release.

3iQ claimed to be the first to launch a bitcoin and ethereum exchange-traded product listed on a major global stock exchange, and was among the first to introduce bitcoin, Solana and ethereum ETFs on the TSX.

In 2024, Japanese brokerage firm Monex Group acquired a majority stake in 3iQ and all its subsidiaries to grow Monex’s asset management business.