Grant: Alliance Grants

The goal of this project is to develop quantitative finance and data analytics solutions that will enable Canadian households to enhance their financial resilience. Combining state of the art actuarial and financial models with comprehensive proprietary datasets provided by our corporate partners and powered by advances in machine learning and data science, we will provide insights and solutions for Canadians to help facilitate data-driven financial decision making. Our industrial partners are committed to making these insights broadly available at the workplace or in the home. Existing work done by our team with just one of our partners, the Canadian Payroll Association (CPA), reveals that even before the COVID-19 pandemic about one in three Canadians were struggling financially -- and that these struggling Canadians were not limited to one setting, gender, or even income level. Our 2020 follow up to this analysis revealed that the number of Canadians struggling had doubled since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. This family financial fragility exacts a heavy personal toll on Canadians and represents a failure point for our nation in future crises. In addition to the CPA, our partners encompass actuarial consultant Morneau Shepell, whose data can help us understand Canadians' retirement solutions; payroll provider Ceridian, whose data will help us understand income and its timing, and Aligned Capital Partners, whose data provides a rich window into the way Canadians actually invest their savings. Each of our partners will be able to incorporate our findings into their practices, services and platforms to the benefit of thousands of Canadians. Through the CPA, as an industry association, and the fact that our research will reside in the public domain, we will leverage our findings and impact well beyond our immediate partners.