Headquarters:

Calgary, AB

Year founded:

2014

Number of employees:

Phone:

1 587 323 9131

Email:

siateam@siawm.com

Website:

siawealth.com

LinkedIn:

linkedin.com/company/sia-wealth-management

Jeremy Fehr

Founder

Paul Kornfeld

Director, Technology Services and Portfolio Manager

Jason Leesui

Executive Director, Wealth Services

Leadership

Jeremy Fehr is a financial strategist, technology developer, and thought leader with more than 20 years of experience in the Canadian investment industry. Through collaborations with institutions such as BMO Global Asset Management, he has helped advance the integration of technology into institutional investment products. Fehr’s investment philosophy centres on managing risk through data, discipline, and foresight. He has translated this approach into proprietary algorithms and artificial intelligence applications designed to support long-term portfolio management. As a leader, he promotes disciplined thinking and innovation, helping advisors, families, and institutions preserve capital and build portfolios designed to endure across generations.

Founder

Jeremy Fehr

Paul Kornfeld is director of technology services at SIA Wealth Management, where he oversees product development, client experience, and operational execution across the firm’s technology platform. A graduate of Stanford University in management science and engineering, he began his career developing revenue-focused initiatives within the Stanford Athletic Department. Since joining SIA, Kornfeld has contributed to product development, onboarding, marketing strategy, and support infrastructure, helping shape the firm’s growth and technology offering. Today, he leads the integration of sales, operations, and development, focusing on building scalable systems that transform complex investment intelligence into practical tools for advisors and institutional partners.

Director, Technology Services and Portfolio Manager

Paul Kornfeld

Jason Leesui is executive director of wealth at SIA Wealth Management, bringing over 20 years of experience working with investment advisors across Canada. During his career, he has partnered with more than 500 advisors across major channels, including MFDA, IIROC, and portfolio managers. His background includes senior roles at both an investment dealer and a mutual fund company, giving him broad insight into advisor operations, portfolio construction, and client relationship management. At SIA Wealth Management, Leesui focuses on strengthening advisor and institutional relationships, ensuring the firm’s solutions align with real-world business needs while supporting evolving industry demands and long-term client outcomes.

Executive Director, Wealth Services

Jason Leesui

Christy Hutchison

Vice President, Marketing

Christy Hutchinson serves as vice president, marketing, at Risk Placement Services, where she is responsible for advancing business priorities through strategic and creative marketing programs that position the brand in the marketplace, drive client engagement, and generate demand for RPS products and services. Hutchison’s extensive leadership experience includes roles at prominent marketing firms, where she worked across a range of industries including healthcare, pharmaceuticals. and Fortune 500 insurance companies. She is a graduate of Michigan State University.

Vice President, Marketing

Christy Hutchison

Cristi Carrington

Chief Distribution Officer

Cristi Carrington has worked in the insurance industry for nearly 30 years and is the point person for Brown & Riding’s carrier relationships. She manages the underwriting division and has developed many specialized programs for the company during her tenure, including a Habitational program, DIC, MPL, All Risk, including Wind & Earthquake, and a nationwide risk purchasing group for a top 40 nationally ranked retailer. Carrington currently serves on WSIA’s Board of Directors and is also the organization’s PAC committee co-chair. She also serves as president of the Surplus Line Association of Washington.

Chief Distribution Officer

Cristi Carrington

Christopher Welty, PHR, SHRM-CP

Chief Human Resources Officer

Elizabeth Bounds

General Counsel

Nealy Farshadi

Principal, Strategic Client Relations

Pam Chhabra

Manager – Residential Strata

Christopher Welty joined Brown & Riding in 2007 as an HR assistant and swiftly advanced within the company. His dedication and talent led to a series of promotions, culminating in his appointment as the firm’s CHRO in 2019. During his tenure, Welty has seen B&R more than quadruple in growth. He helped successfully integrate the company through two mergers and has been a strong advocate for many of the company’s important benefit plan enhancements. He excels at collaboration and has been a key contributor in establishing and promoting the company’s culture and offering programs and opportunities to help employees.

Chief Human Resources Officer

Christopher Welty, PHR, SHRM-CP

Elizabeth Bounds oversees Brown & Riding’s legal, risk management, and claims departments. As the company’s chief legal resource, she reviews and negotiates corporate contracts and manages the firm’s litigation, internal legal resources, and relationships with outside counsel. She also works closely with B&R’s senior management in developing overall risk management strategies for the firm and is directly accountable to the Board of Directors for implementing risk control measures and for the facilitation and oversight of corporate liability insurance placements. In the claims department, she takes an especially active role in policy interpretation and client claims advocacy.

General Counsel

Elizabeth Bounds

Nealy Farshadi is instrumental in helping strengthen and grow Brown & Riding’s client relationships. She maintains and improves quality procedures, oversees B&R’s ISO certification, and manages the firm’s client feedback program. Her contributions enable the executive management team to act on client input effectively. As a result, B&R’s client feedback scores greatly exceed the average and continue to improve each year. Farshadi also supports and furthers the growth of B&R and its employees by contributing to professional development within the organization and being a resource to staff.

Principal, Strategic Client Relations

Nealy Farshadi

Stephen McMillan first entered the financial services Industry when he joined GE Capital as a finance analyst in 2008, from which he progressed through roles working both onshore and offshore. From there, he moved into Pacific Premium Funding as a financial planning and analysis leader in 2012 and was a key resource in the evolution of the business, first with the successful sale to Macquarie Pacific Funding and then the following progression into IQumulate Premium Funding, where he is now the commercial manager. As commercial manager, McMillan leads a team that is responsible for commercial analysis and business support, identifying and reporting improvement initiatives, and the securitization and treasury functions of the business.

Commercial Manager

Stephen McMillan

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Inside SIA Wealth: how Jeremy Fehr turned risk discipline into an automation platform

Portfolio Management & Trading Technology for Canadian Advisors

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Adam Basaldella

Manager – Claims

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Claire Watson

Commercial Manager

Stephen McMillan

“If we focus on our talent, then we know our clients will feel the RPS difference and choose us as their first call every time”

Adam Mazan, Risk Placement Services

“Our associates are our number one audience for engagement and support”

Adam Mazan, Risk Placement Services

Ivan Verescuk

Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director

Shaun O’Brien

Head of Underwriting

Emily Walker

Head of Strata and Development

Rex Oakman

Head of Operations and Risk

Sandy Newton

Head of Underwriting

Andrew Mitchell

Manager – NSW

Michael Prokopis

Manager – Southern Region

Pam Chhabra

Manager – Residential Strata

Jeffrey Valdivia

Manager – Commercial Strata

Adam Basaldella

Manager – Claims

In 2002, when major indices were down more than 25 percent, Jeremy Fehr’s clients finished the year with a positive 7 percent return, sitting mostly in US T-bills. That outcome did not come from a lucky hunch. It came from a homegrown system he had started coding two years earlier to answer a basic question: how do you manage risk at scale without burning out the advisor? That question has since developed into SIA Wealth Management, a Canadian firm that builds automated, risk-aware portfolio systems for advisors and institutions. The company’s history is not a straight line from “fintech idea” to product. It was a series of adjustments as Fehr learned what advisors actually needed, what large firms could not build, and where AI now changes the equation. From manual charts to a subscription engine Fehr entered the industry in 1998 as a conventional investment advisor. Within months, he discovered point and figure analysis, a visual and relatively obscure form of technical analysis. It suited the way he processed information, and it worked. “I’m a very visual person, and I gravitated to this technology,” he says. Client portfolios in the late 1990s were compounding rapidly; one high-net-worth account saw a 14-fold return in 16 months.

Success created its own bottleneck. Hours that should have gone to client conversations were swallowed by chart updates. “There is no way for me to scale in this business if I have to work 12- or 18-hour days just doing the analysis,” he says. Automation became a necessity rather than a curiosity. In March 2000, he began coding, formalizing the shift. At the same time, the same client reinforced the broader point: the real risk was not failing to maximize upside but the possibility of “half a billion dollars or zero.” Fehr reoriented his process from hunting opportunities to identifying threats. The new system did two things well. It standardized how risk was evaluated, and it made decisions repeatable. As the tech bubble burst and the post-2002 corrections followed, the software signalled deterioration early. Fehr moved out of technology stocks and, eventually, into cash. Clients complained at first, then appreciated the result. One dissatisfied investor who earned “only” 7 percent in 2002 had a boss who was down 28 percent; the boss became a far larger client. Other advisors noticed. “Jeremy, we want to use your software,” they kept saying. After enough requests, he let a colleague try it and then formalized access as a subscription business. Over several years, subscriptions grew to the point where he left direct advising and focused on technology full time. By 2008, the platform, then branded SIACharts.com, was running across a network of advisors. When it again signalled extreme risk ahead of the financial crisis, some users went to cash and protected their clients. One of them retired in 2015 and still tells Fehr, “My clients are still sending me Christmas baskets because they didn’t get blown up in 2008.” Those episodes created SIA’s core asset: a 26-year live dataset of automated portfolio decisions, plus roughly three more decades of backtesting behind it, all stress-tested through real crashes and recoveries. The gap SIA chose: ideas and automation, not another product shelf SIA might have stopped there as a niche research and charting tool. Instead, it moved into wealth management mandates, separately managed accounts, and partnerships with firms such as BMO Global Asset Management. Automated portfolios had been operating since 2000, long before robo-advisors became fashionable, but the firm’s unique leverage was not product manufacturing. It was the combination of data, process, and the ability to work across different types of clients, from retail investors to institutions and now Family Offices. Today, SIA’s systems influence roughly 1,150 advisors in Canada, something like 5–8 percent of the market. The next phase is about depth, not breadth. Over the coming two years, the firm aims to build deep, integrated partnerships with about 150 of those teams, ideally in a triangle with their dealers. The point is not just better tools but a reorganization of where time is spent. In an early implementation, automation freed about 40 percent of an advisory group’s time, enough to turn two staff roles into pure client experience work.

Product Overview

SIA Wealth Management delivers a proprietary, index-driven investment framework designed to help advisors strengthen portfolio construction while deepening client relationships. As direct-to-retail platforms continue to reshape the industry, it has become increasingly clear that access to technology alone is not enough. Advisors are facing growing pressure to differentiate, scale, and remain relevant while managing rising operational and compliance demands. SIA’s approach addresses this directly by combining proprietary investment technology with expert partnership, enabling advisors to apply sophisticated strategies with clarity and confidence. Through structured indexing relationships, the platform extends advisors’ capabilities across both domestic and international markets while preserving the central role of the advisor in client decision-making.

Key features and capabilities

Proprietary relative strength and point-and-figure investment methodology Access to structured index relationships to enhance portfolio construction Model-driven frameworks aligned with growth, balanced, and income mandates Automation of repetitive portfolio management tasks and workflow processes Tools designed to support evolving compliance requirements and documentation Scalable implementation across multiple client accounts Cross-border allocation capabilities to support global diversification Advisor-facing tools to enhance client communication and engagement Ongoing partnership to support real-world application and decision-making

Integrations

SIA’s framework is designed to integrate with the systems advisors already rely on, including portfolio management platforms, dealer and custodian infrastructure, and client reporting environments. The platform also supports relationships with external asset managers and index providers, allowing advisors to incorporate proprietary and third-party strategies within a unified structure. This ensures flexibility across jurisdictions and business models while maintaining operational continuity.

Advisors implement SIA’s proprietary model portfolios within their existing accounts based on client mandate, such as growth, balanced, or income. The platform continuously monitors holdings using SIA’s relative strength and point-and-figure methodology, generating clear, rules-based signals for portfolio adjustments. These signals can be applied systematically across accounts, reducing manual review and ad hoc decision-making. Automated workflows structure key elements of the investment process, including portfolio alignment, rebalancing, and ongoing monitoring. These workflows help ensure consistency across client accounts while supporting the documentation and auditability required under current compliance frameworks. Through established index relationships, advisors can also implement these strategies within structured mandates, extending their reach across different client types and jurisdictions without changing their core process. The result is a repeatable, scalable workflow in which advisors retain control over decisions while reducing operational burden and compliance risk.

How your product works

After sales and customer services

SIA Wealth Management provides ongoing, hands-on support to ensure advisors can effectively implement and scale the platform within their practice. This begins with structured onboarding, where advisors are guided through model alignment, workflow integration, and implementation across client accounts. As part of this process, advisors have access to backtesting capabilities, allowing them to evaluate strategies across different market environments and build confidence in how the models behave over time. Support continues through regular engagement, including access to market insights, portfolio guidance, and direct communication with the SIA team. Advisors are supported not only in operating the platform but also in applying it, whether that involves refining workflows, communicating strategy to clients, or adapting to changing market conditions. Rather than a traditional support model, the relationship is designed as an ongoing partnership, helping advisors navigate evolving compliance expectations while maintaining a consistent and repeatable investment process.

Explore Strategic Indexing Today

www.siafintech.com

operates with a clear growth mindset. Strategic initiatives are carefully aligned to foster both organizational and individual advancement. The leadership team’s entrepreneurial spirit permeates the company, inspiring employees to pursue ambitious goals and embrace new opportunities. RPS’s most significant recent initiative has been its comprehensive talent strategy, which places employee engagement, recruitment, and development at the forefront.