A new business officially launched in Thompson in October with the goal of helping clients to understand how the Canadian financial system works and to achieve their own personal goals.
World Financial Group held its grand opening Oct. 13 and is headed up by senior partner Lina Stadler from Alberta and Thompsonite Kylie Matechuk, who will take over operating the company on her own a few months down the road.
“We’re a full services financial firm,” said Matechuk during the opening of World Financial Group’s office on Seal Road. “We do everything from help people budget, help people restructure their finances, help people get out of debt. We also are licensed life agents so we’re able to set people up with life insurance and we’re also licensed agents to offer investment funds.”
Wold Financial Group started off by putting on financial literacy classes at University College of the North (UCN) back in April of this year and Matechuk said the response to those monthly classes showed her that there is a market in Thompson for this kind of business.
“We decided in April we’re going to test the waters if people would be interested in what we do and we’ve just had rooms packed ever since we’ve been doing this,” she said. “Now that we have our office we’re going to be doing them here and we just teach people how the Canadian financial system works and we just show people that, ‘Hey, these are the options that you have available to you that maybe you might not know about,’ and as a broker we’re able to shop the market for them.”
World Financial Group’s agents and brokers don’t sell their own financial and investment products but act as distributors for other financial companies including Royal Bank, Bank of Montreal, TD Bank and others.
“We work with over 88 different companies,” Matechuk says. “Basically we look at our clients’ financial needs and their financial goals and dreams and then we build a plan for them and we do it tailored to what they need. If their dreams are to take their kids to Disneyland once a year we want to show them, ‘OK, this is exactly what you need to do to be able to do that.’”
World Financial Group’s services are free and it currently has about 20 agents and brokers in Thompson as well as six or seven in Winnipeg, Matechuk says, with goals to spread out throughout Northern Manitoba.
“We’re looking to expand in Flin Flon, The Pas and Churchill,” she says.
Then-councillor Penny Byer attended World Financial Group’s ribbon-cutting ceremony and said that entrepreneurship is one way for Thompson’s economy to diversify at a time when the traditional economic drivers for the community are shrinking and changing.
“I want to congratulate Kylie for her wisdom to start a business like this, her courage to start a business at a time when everybody is trying not to look at the positive side of things and also for her spirit and her enthusiasm,” said Byer. “She’s the kind of person that you can gain more energy from just by being around her and I think that is so awesome.”
The key to World Financial Group’s business is empowering clients to build a financial plan that works for them.
“We teach our agents and our clients the same thing so that everything is transparent,” Matechuk says. “We teach finance so that it’s fun and not intimidating. We teach it in a really fun way so that everybody can understand so that when we are doing plan-building for them the client knows that they’re in control and they’re making the options and they’re setting up their own life, not us. We just provide the information for them.”
As for launching a financial business at a time of economic change and uncertainty in Thompson, Matechuk says that it is a great time to be helping people to become more financially literate and independent.
“We’re able to help so many different people with options when they literally thought it was bleak and they couldn’t do anything about it so I think it’s the perfect time.”
