Decision Support Comes of Age: CIRO’s OEO Shift and the Future of Self-Directed Investing

The Canadian Investment Regulatory Organization’s (CIRO) updated guidance on Order Execution Only (OEO) accounts, expected in early 2026, will formally allow firms to provide decision-making support to self-directed investors. On its face, the change appears modest: a clarification around what constitutes a “recommendation,” and a narrowing of the long-standing prohibition against providing guidance.

In practice, however, the update reflects something much larger. It acknowledges a reality that platforms, investors, and regulators have all been circling for years: self-directed investors are taking the search for guidance into their own hands. The question is no longer whether they should receive this guidance, but where, how, and under what constraints.

In this two-part series, we’ll outline the challenges and opportunities the new guidance presents for self-directed platform providers operating in Canada, the behavioral changes that will result and some practical ideas for bringing them into reality.

Why the New Guidance Matters

For regulated platforms, this represents a powerful opportunity to strengthen their brand and existing planning capabilities to meet retail investors where those retail investors already are: looking for advice. With powerful and easy to use tooling and advice, platforms can gather additional assets under management (AUM) and help investors grow their accounts and increase trading volumes through responsible planning.

The market has shown investors are willing to engage with, pay for, and spread the word about better tooling. According to J.D. Power, platforms offering digital guidance tools –even to nominally "do-it-yourself" investors – generate significantly higher satisfaction scores, greater share of wallet, and stronger likelihood of referral. This translates directly to AUM: Schwab's free Schwab Plan tool generated over 60,000 financial plans in 2021 alone, while digital logins jumped 33% to 3.6 billion.

This hybrid model – self-directed trading plus embedded planning tools – unlocks multiple new monetization opportunities, from premium subscription tiers and managed account upgrades to cross-selling of banking and lending products. Wealthsimple's VP of Capital Markets put it bluntly: "Today's retail investor is intentional, curious, and motivated. They deserve modern, intuitive tools to maximize opportunities within capital markets."

Now that Canadian firms have more flexibility to incorporate these tools, the gloves have come off. User experience will generate revenue directly – and it will increase its share as commissions continue their relentless decline. Without action on this front, the major Canadian platforms will continue to lose clients and AUM to upstarts.

Aiding the Self-Directed Search for Insight

The timing of this update is not accidental. Self-directed investing has grown rapidly, driven in large part by younger and first-time investors who want to take their finances into their own hands. Many are mobile-native, self-educating, and accustomed to continuous digital engagement.

Crucially, these investors are already relying heavily on informal and unregulated sources for guidance. Surveys show that a majority of younger investors now actively seek financial advice via social media, with 76% of Gen Z and 65% of millennials reporting that they use these channels for guidance. Whether this practice is wise is almost beside the point. The behavior is already entrenched.

When regulated platforms refrain from providing guidance, they do not create a vacuum. They push investors elsewhere, often to sources with less authority, credibility, and skin in the game. CIRO’s guidance acknowledges this reality rather than attempting to resist it, creating an opening for firms to engage more responsibly and more effectively.

From Transactional Disclosure to Continuous, Integrated Support

Allowing decision-making support has implications well beyond compliance language. It challenges longstanding assumptions about how self-directed platforms are designed and how investors are served.

Historically, support has been concentrated around discrete moments: disclosures at the point of trade, generic reports, and educational resources users had to actively seek out, often detached from real portfolio context. The ability to offer decision support changes that model. Alerts, nudges, monitoring, and contextual insights introduce a more ongoing relationship between the investor and the platform. The experience becomes continuous rather than transactional.

Supporting investors in this way requires rethinking workflows, state awareness and how information is surfaced – not just what tools are technically available. Logical enhancements include portfolio monitoring, sample portfolios, pre-trade intelligence, questionnaire-based risk modeling, planning tools and gamification. In our next piece, we’ll dive into how these tools and more can drive the next era of self-directed investing.

This ongoing relationship goes beyond direct platform interaction – it extends to advisor-led experiences. Increasingly, self-directed activity precedes human advice. When these investors reach the point of engaging an advisor – whether due to portfolio size, complexity, or changes in temperament – they arrive at those relationships with history. That includes their past investments and the assumptions they have internalized. Advisors must inherit that context rather than starting from zero.

This raises the bar for data unification and shared workflows across channels. There must be continuity across self-directed, platform-guided, and advisor-led experiences. This holistic approach also elevates the advisor’s role, enabling human expertise to focus on strategy and judgment rather than replicating basic tools.

This is an area of opportunity for challengers with mature wealth advisory offerings: a seamless ramp from digital advice to personal advice is an offering few people have.

Conclusion: Defining the Next Model of Guidance

CIRO’s updated OEO guidance points toward a more continuous, interpretive model of support – one that helps investors make sense of decisions over time without dictating outcomes. In doing so, it shifts the center of gravity from isolated disclosures toward integrated experiences that preserve context, understand investor state, and surface relevant information when it matters.

Crucially, this guidance does not invent a new behavior; it legitimizes one that already exists. Firms can either meet investors where they are or cede ground to other sources. The choice – and the associated assets under management – are theirs.