As Toronto-based FinTech firm Questrade integrates more AI into its retail stock trading platform, the president of its growth portfolio says he’s surprised so few people are using the tech on their portfolios.
“Robots are really good at synthesizing and aggregating, but really bad at decision making … and humans are really good at decision making.”
In a panel discussion at the 2026 Canadian Finance Summit on Thursday afternoon during Toronto Tech Week, Questrade’s Salim Naran said his son, who is an intern at the company, is working on figuring out how willing people are to use AI for their financial services.
“It’s surprisingly low, and I don’t get it,” Naran said. “No one’s saying it has to do anything for you, right? [Assess] your portfolio through it and see what happens.”
Naran was joined by fellow FinTech leaders, Fiscal AI CEO Braden Dennis, Tilt CEO Andrew Peek, and panel moderator Tal Schwartz to dissect why consumers trust AI in other areas, but not in finance.
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“People feel very comfortable taking stock tips off Reddit or from the guy they met on the golf course, but when you ask [Anthropic’s AI chatbot] Claude for some investing tips … all of a sudden we become compliance officers,” Schwartz said.
A recent study from TD found that while more than three-quarters of people are using AI tools in their daily lives, less than one in five would use AI to help them make financial decisions. Some financial institutions, like Robinhood in the US, have integrated agentic workflows into their financial services for consumers. But plugging financial information into LLMs can pose privacy risks, or potentially risk generating false information.
Tal Schwartz
“People feel very comfortable taking stock tips off Reddit or from the guy they met on the golf course, but when you ask Claude for some investing tips … all of a sudden we become compliance officers.”
While Naran said he believes money managers will eventually have AI agents running their portfolios, Dennis said one of Fiscal AI’s clients gave numerous AI models 10,000 hypothetical dollars to invest over three months, and four of them lost over 90 percent of the capital, “which is impressive.”
“Robots are really good at synthesizing and aggregating, but really bad at decision making … and humans are really good at decision making,” Dennis said.
The panellists agreed that AI, in its current form, is best used to help investors comprehend their portfolios. Naran said Questrade is working on more tools in that vein.
“Our customers are self-directed by choice, so they chose to go on a platform without an advisor, and they choose to make those decisions,” Naran said. “It’s our job to create products … that help bring them up the curve with comprehension and data and AI.”
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Feature image courtesy Alex Riehl for BetaKit.