Can struggling young Canadians still retire well? The head of RBC Royal Trust thinks they can

Leanne Kaufman wants you to start thinking about retirement as soon as you receive your first real paycheque.
As the president and CEO of RBC Royal Trust, Kaufman says most Canadians only start thinking about retirement as they near the end of their earning years. But she believes those conversations — and savings plans — should start much sooner.
“They should start thinking about it the minute they start earning a paycheque,” she says. “It’s hard to make people think about these things in their youth — and by youth, I mean under 35 or 40.”
A lawyer by trade, Kaufman entered the trust industry in 1999 after a brief stint in construction litigation, and has been employed by RBC Royal Trust ever since. The 125-year-old institution provides estate, trust and power of attorney services, and employs a staff of about 350 in all 10 provinces.
Since her appointment as president and CEO in 2015, RBC Royal Trust has seen a 65 per cent increase in revenue, a 38.5 per cent increase in staff, and a 166 per cent increase in will appointments. Now Kaufman says she’s focused on using her platform to help Canadians grapple with some of the questions many avoid until it’s too late.
“Most of us, when we think about retirement planning, are probably thinking about the first 10 years or so after we stopped working, when we’re keen to travel and play a lot of golf or tennis or pickleball or whatever,” she says. “We often aren’t super focused on the end-of-life years and some of the high expenses that may come along with caregiving, retirement or long-term care, living arrangements and so on.”
Canadians may not rely on trusts as much as they did 125 years ago, but executors, trustees and estate planning services remain in high demand as the country approaches a historic generational wealth transfer.
Kaufman spoke with the Star from her office in Toronto about the implications of longevity trends on financial planning, how historic gender gaps are creating new financial imbalances, and whether older Canadians should consider passing down some of their wealth sooner.
We’ve been doing largely the same thing for 125 years, which is to act as executor or trustee or power of attorney for individual clients. We do have other related parts of the business — we have a team that’s dedicated to trusts for Indigenous communities, and one that runs pension-related trusts — but the core business is really acting in those personal capacities.
Not enough people understand that when they themselves are named as executor or power of attorney — or they’re thinking of who to name in their own will — that there’s a potential role for a professional trust company, whether to be appointed as the primary executor or attorney, or to help the family member or friends that they intend to appoint.
This isn’t something that most people do every day. They believe it to be an honour to be named, but they don’t understand how much work is involved and the liability and the stress that can come along with it until they’re well into the process. We want people to do their planning in advance, and to give their family a chance to understand what’s involved and make an informed decision on whether they’re interested in taking on that role.
The work is fascinating, it’s intellectually stimulating, and the people are fabulous. We’re in people’s lives at very delicate and sensitive times, and it’s a privilege to be entrusted with the role that we’re asked to do.
I’ve also always had wonderful bosses, even at times when life has been challenging. It’s a wonderful culture, and I’ve always felt accommodated and cared for.
I hope so. I think that COVID taught us all the importance of empathy and authenticity in leadership, and those are two of the words that I hope my team would use to describe me.
I think having a legal background was helpful because of the nature of the work that we do. At the same time, I think I bring a real passion to grow the business, seeing the potential that it has, knowing what’s coming demographically.
The public has been underserviced for a long time when it comes to understanding late-life, estate and capacity planning, and it was important to me to build that education and awareness.
Our partners within Wealth Management, as part of what we’re calling our “Longevity Strategy,” started a partnership with the National Institute on Ageing, and I sit on their advisory board. We are involved with the Women’s Brain Health Initiative, which led us to a partnership with Elder Caring Inc., which provides services to our clients, as well as information on elder caring.
We partnered with the Women’s Age Lab out of Women’s College Hospital, focused on gendered ageism, and have been working with the MIT AgeLab. We’ve got a strategic relationship with Cleveland Clinic of Canada, focused on preventative health care, making sure that our clients have access to information and resources to help them age as well as possible.
There is an older generation where women seem less involved in conversations about investments but are involved in the goal-setting and estate planning side of things. That’s something we’ve noticed as an industry.
One area that the Women’s Age Lab is focused on is the pension gap. Women retire with 83 cents for every dollar of her male counterparts, and that’s in part due to systemic pay equity issues, in part due to stepping out of the workforce during pensionable years for caregiving, and it’s an area where we want to bring awareness. Women are living longer with less pensionable income, and if they lose a partner, they may lose their income but have the same expenses.
Well, it’s certainly not an issue in my subset of the business, because the Trust Company is 75 per cent female, but as an industry we must start with early talent. When there’s fewer women going into the industry, it creates less of a pool to choose from for leadership ranks. We are seeing incremental change, and I’ve seen a change just in the time I’ve been sitting in this leadership chair around the pipeline of female talent.
There’s lots of opportunity to grow both the business that I’m leading with support from the great team that I have around me, but also take this longevity lens further. There’s a role for RBC to be an industry leader in longevity and aging well. It’s a passion project for me, but there’s also a real need.
This is an unprecedented time, so we don’t have any way to look back and say how this might play out in the longer term, but I do think this is a blip.
First and foremost, they should be looking at any employer-offered plans that are available. If there’s any sort of profit-sharing or pension plan, that’s basically free money that could be available for their retirement and could make a big difference over time with the magic of compounding interest.
Many people in that generation, at some point, will also be the beneficiaries of some inheritance as well, and their situation may change dramatically, so it doesn’t hurt to think about what your goals and aspirations would be once that comes into play.
I know not everyone’s going to inherit, but there is a lot of money held by older generation that will eventually make its way intergenerationally. Having conversations with the older generation about what their goals and aspirations for their legacy is and how the younger generation fits into that is another way that they could be doing some planning and thinking about the future.
It’s always part of the conversation, and it depends on needs. There has been a noticeable increase in parents or grandparents helping the next generation get into the housing market, particularly with the high mortgage rates recently. The only thing that needs to be cautioned is not giving away too much too soon. That’s where a really good financial plan comes into play, because there’s excellent math models that will show, if you take so much out, is there still going to be enough generated to keep living the way in which you want to live well to 100 or beyond?
Financial plans are still largely focused on 90 to 95 as an average, because 100 is not going to be the average, but living to 100 is becoming more and more common.