The New Canadian Newcomer Finance Story
Rather than observing more of the same struggling newcomer narrative over and over, our team has discovered a new story emerging—one that tells the tale of a more prepared population.
For many of us, the first thing that comes to mind when we think of immigrants is a struggling population—those who come here with little understanding of the culture they’re entering into, only to spend a generation struggling so they can give their children a better future. It’s a story that Saima Naz knows all too well.
Saima moved to Montreal from Pakistan with her family when she was a small child. Her parents came here with an attitude that paying cash is always best. They had little understanding of the way finances worked in the developed Western world, and were wary of taking on any debt.
As Saima describes it, her family always had enough to survive, but they were missing out on opportunities. If her parents had had a better understanding of finance and not been so averse to debt, they could have been much better off—and Saima was determined not to make the same mistakes. At 15, she opened her first bank account, and by 21 she had taken out a $5,000 loan to start a small business. She purchased her first family home for about $500,000 when she was 23 and today, 11 years later, that property is valued at well over $1 million.
It’s a familiar story, considered by many to be the norm for a successful immigration cycle. An immigrant generation struggles and sacrifices so that their children can build the knowledge they need to thrive in the following generation.
Today though, that narrative seems to apply less and less. In actuality, our data suggest that emerging technologies in today’s highly connected world have significantly widened the spectrum of a typical immigrant success story. Having conducted an
annual survey to understand new Canadians’ financial habits
, product usage, attitudes and satisfaction towards their financial institutions since 2010, the Cultural Markets team at Environics Research has kept a close eye on this recent new trend.
Rather than observing more of the same struggling newcomer narrative over and over, our team has discovered a new story emerging—one that tells the tale of a more prepared population, ready and excited for the challenges of entering a new cultural situation. Our data shows that, even before their arrival, this new generation of immigrants is doing their research and diligently preparing for upcoming challenges. When we asked newcomers that arrived in the past five years when they opened their first bank account, almost three in ten (28%) say they had done so before they made the move.
Moreover, we’ve seen a steadily increasing proportion of newcomers agreeing with the statement “I feel as though have the knowledge to get the most out of the financial services choices available in Canada”—revealing a confidence we’ve rarely seen from past generations of newcomers.
Of those newcomers that came here in the past five years, a whopping 75% have opened a second Canadian bank account