Steve Randall

Steve Randall turns economic data, industry research, and policy reports into clear, actionable intelligence for financial advisors, pension leaders, and wealth managers. He is a senior financial journalist at Wealth Professional, where he covers Canadian investments, retirement planning, exchange-traded funds, and the broader wealth management industry, and at Benefits and Pensions Monitor, where he writes on institutional investment and pension fund trends. He authors the Morning Briefing newsletter for Wealth Professional, reaches thousands of financial professionals each day, and also writes for InvestmentNews on US financial markets and regulatory developments.

Household financial stress and client resilience

Randall devotes substantial coverage to the financial strain facing working Canadians, using national survey data to quantify how far households are from financial security. In his reporting on workplace and wellness research, he tracks the share of Canadians who feel less financially secure than a year ago, breaking the numbers down by region and income to show that insecurity cuts across the labour market.

He highlights findings on emergency savings, such as the proportion of workers who could not cover even one or two months of expenses if they lost their job, and connects these figures directly to advisors’ challenges in building client resilience.

He extends this lens to financial stress in the workplace, outlining how rising numbers of employees are classified as financially stressed and living paycheque to paycheque.

In those pieces, he pulls out estimates of productivity losses in dollar terms, showing how household balance sheets are now a material issue for employers as well as advisors. Across these stories, he uses concise explanations and clear metrics to link survey results to the practical risks facing clients, from thin safety nets to heightened vulnerability to economic shocks.

Retirement security, pensions, and long-term outcomes

Retirement adequacy and pensions are a recurring strand in Randall’s work, spanning both retail advice and institutional plans.

At Wealth Professional, he reports on global retirement index rankings, documenting Canada’s slide from higher positions a decade ago to its current standing and framing this as growing pressure on advisors to close the gap between wealth and retirement readiness. He draws out the long-term trend, noting how incremental drops in ranking accumulate into a picture of deteriorating retirement security.

His coverage of US defined contribution consultant studies surfaces lessons for Canadian advisors, focusing on themes such as AI adoption in retirement plans, the growing use of private assets, and the demand for more personalised retirement income planning. He summarises complex survey work from large asset managers, translating consultant-level findings into practical signals on where retirement product design and advice expectations are heading.

On the institutional side, his Benefits and Pensions Monitor work covers pension fund performance, retirement planning, private markets, fixed income, and employment and HR developments, tying macro forces back to how pension and group benefits sponsors manage long-term obligations.

Capital markets, investment flows, and productivity

Randall frequently situates advisor and pension decisions within broader capital markets and productivity dynamics. His reporting on Canada’s “business investment emergency” uses think-tank research to chart how capital spending on machinery, equipment, and intellectual property has fallen as a share of GDP compared with earlier periods, despite political emphasis on attracting investment. He details the gap between headline commitments and the actual levels of spending on productivity-enhancing assets, underscoring the structural nature of the problem.

He follows through with coverage of Canada’s potential to unlock $1 trillion in incremental capital spending, unpacking research that identifies priority sectors such as liquefied natural gas, mining, electric vehicles, pharmaceuticals, and data centres. In those articles, he explains how foreign direct investment is concentrating in future-shaping industries and what execution gaps are keeping investors on the sidelines. His work on capital markets fees and regulatory fragmentation shows how current fee structures raise costs for businesses and investors, discouraging national capital formation and undermining competitiveness. He also reports on C.D.

Howe Institute analysis of fiscal drift, weak productivity, and rising deficits, highlighting the risk of stagnant living standards and rising debt burdens absent policy change.

Alongside these structural themes, Randall tracks market structure shifts within the fund industry, such as the growing dominance of ETFs and the pressure this places on traditional fund families as assets and flows approach the trillion-dollar mark. He uses data from industry digests to compare ETF and mutual fund flows and to illustrate how product trends are redrawing the competitive landscape for banks, global firms, and boutique managers.

Technology, AI, and evolving asset classes

Technology and artificial intelligence are central in Randall’s recent coverage, both as engines of wealth creation and as tools inside advisory firms.

He reports on global research showing record household financial assets and rising net wealth, while warning that AI-driven concentration of gains among asset owners creates new fault lines in wealth distribution. In those articles, he combines global asset figures with country rankings to show where Canada sits in terms of net financial assets per capita.

At the practice level, he writes about AI adoption by financial advisors, citing data on how many hours per week the technology is saving and translating that into annual time freed for client work. His profiles of firm-level AI strategies, such as Raymond James Canada’s approach, focus on how technology is organised around giving advisors more time with clients rather than being treated as a purely technical project. He also covers investment vehicles linked to AI and structural reforms, including surging flows into single-country US ETFs that target these themes.

Beyond conventional assets, Randall has reported on songwriting catalogues and music rights as investment assets, reflecting an interest in how intellectual property and alternative asset classes fit into modern portfolios.

Across these areas, his through-line is consistent: he uses data-rich reports, surveys, and policy analysis, combines them with market and practice trends, and writes in precise, compressed prose that keeps the focus on what changing conditions mean for advisors, asset owners, and pension stakeholders.