We really appreciate your interest in Wealthsimple! I'm happy to answer this for you. We believe we've built the best investment service in Canada for the following reasons:
Fee structure: Tangerine Funds have a MER of 1.07%, while our fees range from 0.35-0.5% depending on the size of your account. We are the lowest cost provider in Canada. We cover all trading costs and administration fees, and we have negotiated institutional pricing on currency and ETF MERs. We also don't charge fees on your first $5,000 invested.
Eric Kirzner is head of our Investment Committee: Prof. Kirzner is head of value investing at the Rotman School of Management and was on the team that built the very first ETF in the world in 1989. He has played a major role in encouraging the use of ETFs by institutional and individual investors for decades. Prof. Kirzner joined our team because he shares our belief that everyone deserves sophisticated investment management.
Smarter investment service: We are the only technology-driven investment manager in Canada that publicly shares its investment methodology. While others offer a simple 6-8 asset class portfolio, we believe that an investment manager should do better than what you can do on your own. You can find out how we do it here: wealthsimple.com/methodology
Simpler platform: We are the only investment manager in Canada with a seamless, paperless onboarding experience. It may seem silly, but every other investment manager in the country still requires paperwork and wet signatures to open most types of investment accounts. We also build everything to look awesome and work well on web and mobile.
Complete transparency: Before you sign up, we show you what your allocation is going to be and demonstrate why we selected the ETFs in your portfolio. Your dashboard clearly shows the four numbers you care about (and can't find easily with most managers): how much you put in, how much you're up, what you paid in fees (yup, fees too), and the arithmetic gives you your balance today. We believe you should always know how you're doing and what you're paying for.
I hope this helps answer your question and highlights some of the major differences between the products! Happy to answer any other questions you may have.