IG Wealth Management launches IG Empower Your Tomorrow community platform to build Canadians' financial confidence

New IG Financial Confidence Index finds nearly half of Canadians admit they feel anxious when thinking about their finances

WINNIPEG, Nov. 28, 2018 /CNW/ - Building on a 92-year history of helping clients plan for their financial future, IG Wealth Management (formerly Investors Group) is furthering its commitment of improving Canadians' financial futures with the launch of a new community platform, IG Empower Your Tomorrow.

As a founding member of Imagine Canada's Caring Company program, since 1988 IG Wealth Management has dedicated one per cent of pre-tax profits annually to communities, charities and non-profits across Canada. To build on our commitment to support communities across the country, the IG Empower Your Tomorrow program will leverage Caring Company funds to help increase the financial confidence of Canadians. 

"IG Wealth Management has an incredible legacy of community support, beginning with our employees and Consultants, who dedicate their time and resources to worthwhile causes across Canada," said Jeff Carney, President and CEO, IG Wealth Management. "Through our day-to-day business and ongoing community involvement, we recognize the opportunity to enhance the financial literacy and education of Canadians, leading to a better financial future for those who need it most. We are excited to launch the IG Empower Your Tomorrow platform and become the national champion for Canadians' financial confidence."

IG Empower Your Tomorrow will focus on four groups that will be best served by additional education and resources to help build financial knowledge: Indigenous peoples, New Canadians, seniors and youth. Working with community partners and organizations along with our employees and clients, IG Wealth Management will continue to develop and execute seminars, events and programs focused on increasing the financial confidence of these key groups. 

Focusing on Canadians' financial confidence is particularly important today: results from Ipsos Canada's 2017 Understanding Canadians study showed that 55% of Canadians believe they will be worse off than previous generations when it comes to having enough money to live well.

IG Financial Confidence Index
The first step in helping Canadians build financial confidence is to understand how confident people actually are. The IG Financial Confidence Index, launched in partnership with Ipsos Canada, will annually track and report on the overall financial confidence of Canadians from coast-to-coast-to-coast.

In the first year of the index, Canadians appear to be moderately confident in their financial lives, but nearly half of all Canadians (43 per cent) admit they feel anxious when thinking about their finances. Of those, 81 per cent are concerned the money they have, or will save, won't last.  As expected, Canadians in lower income and asset groups generally feel less confident than their wealthier peers.

"Results from this first iteration of the IG Financial Confidence Index demonstrate that Canadians' confidence in their financial future is directly proportional to their self-assessed level of effort at managing their finances," says Sébastien Dallaire, Senior Vice-President, Ipsos Canada. "Data also show that those who got professional advice are both more confident and less anxious."

One particular point of interest emerging from the index is that among those deemed as having "lower confidence" (0 – 50 on the index scale), more than half (51 per cent) say that they feel they haven't tried hard enough to manage their finances, and 35 per cent saying they avoid thinking about finances.

As the financial world continues to evolve, IG Wealth Management is committed to providing the support necessary to empower Canadians to build prosperous futures.

About IG Wealth Management
Founded in 1926, IG Wealth Management is a national leader in delivering personalized financial solutions to Canadians through a network of Consultants located across Canada. In addition to an exclusive family of mutual funds and other investment vehicles, IG offers a wide range of other financial services. IG Wealth Management has $85 billion in assets under management as of October 31, 2018 and is a member of the IGM Financial Inc. (TSX: IGM) group of companies. IGM Financial is one of Canada's premier financial services companies with over $153 billion in total assets under management as of October 31, 2018.

Research Methodology
The results presented in this summary report are from an Ipsos survey conducted from October 20 to October 22, 2018. A total sample of 1,000 respondents from across Canada participated in the survey. Weighting was applied to the total sample by age, gender, region and education level to ensure that the composition of the final sample is representative of Canada's adult population according to the latest census data from Statistics Canada.

Since the online portion of the sample is not considered to be probabilistic, Ipsos cannot apply a margin of error to this survey. The precision of non-probabilistic Ipsos surveys is measured using a credibility interval. The credibility interval for a survey of 1,000 respondents is  ±3.5 percentage points, 19 times out of 20. The credibility interval will be wider among subsets of the population.

SOURCE IG Wealth Management

Media Contacts: Mark Gamache, Proof Inc., Tel: [phone], [email protected]