Funds and other financial vehicles

This code counts pools of money, not businesses. A pension fund exists because an employer or a government sponsors a plan; nobody founds one to compete for customers, and its members are assigned by their employment rather than won. The honest screen is that this is a buyer, not a market to enter, and the addressable market for an entrant as a pension fund is nil — which is why the cut is market size even though the pools are vast. Statistics Canada put trusteed pension assets at $2.6 trillion at the end of 2025, up 6.2%, with public-sector plans holding $2.1 trillion — 82.4% of the total — against $460.6 billion in private-sector plans [A]. That concentration is the second finding. The establishment count bears it out: 70 employers, of which 17 have 200 or more staff — the large public plans that run investment teams in-house — while private-sector plan assets grew only 1.5% in the year. So even what is sold to these funds (asset management mandates, custody, actuarial and administration services) faces a small number of very large buyers who increasingly do the work themselves, and a long tail of private plans that is barely growing. Those supplier markets are the ones to screen; the fund-administration software sold into this branch is screened separately at 526.

A fund is a legal vehicle, so the enterable proposition here is the act of launching one — registering as an investment fund manager, filing a prospectus and seeding a mutual fund or ETF. Read that way the category is enormous and growing: SIMA reported mutual fund assets of $2.797 trillion and ETF assets of $924.2 billion at the end of August 2026, both all-time highs [A]. The vehicle is also cheap to create relative to that pool; trustees, custodians and administrators are all for hire, which is the point of the 526 fund-administration record nearby. The cut is who decides which funds a saver is shown. A fund does not sell itself: it is placed by an adviser from a dealer's approved shelf, or picked by a self-directed investor from a screen sorted by size, fee and track record — and a new fund has none of the three. The flow figures show where the marginal dollar goes: ETF net sales of $15.5 billion in August against $4.7 billion for mutual funds [A], into a format where the product is an index somebody else publishes, the fee is the only variable left, and the winners are the issuers with the scale to live on it. The 681 establishments, 508 of them with one to four employees, are mostly the vehicles themselves and small managers running private pools — real businesses, but built on a client book the founder already had, not on a product launched cold.