Backgrounder: Consultative document on Senior Leader Accountability
Backgrounder -
Overview
The Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions (OSFI) is issuing a consultative document on senior leader accountability. This nine-month consultation focuses on a principles-based regime to modernize suitability and accountability standards for senior leaders of federally regulated financial institutions. This regime is a subset of OSFI’s broader corporate governance work, but one of the areas OSFI considers most critical.
Why it’s important
Canada’s financial services are growing more complex amid a more uncertain risk environment. As the landscape changes, governance standards, capabilities and practices must keep pace to address new challenges and skill needs.
Strong senior leader accountability helps institutions stay resilient, manage risk and maintain public trust. Weak suitability and accountability can pose serious non‑financial risks. Leaders who are unsuitable or unaccountable can weaken governance, harm public trust in their institutions, and affect the broader economy and financial system.
To gather feedback on its proposed senior leader accountability regime, OSFI is engaging early and often with a broad range of stakeholders. The goal is to ensure the regime is practical, effective, and aligned with industry realities and international practices.
OSFI’s approach is principles‑based and focused on outcomes rather than prescriptive rules. This allows institutions to tailor their frameworks to their size and complexity, reinforce good practices, and build on the governance and controls they already have in place.
The extended consultation period gives institutions time to provide input, while continuing their day‑to‑day operations. The timeline also reflects OSFI’s decision to postpone consultation on the draft Corporate Governance and Accountability Guideline.
Next steps
The consultation period ends on October 31, 2026. Stakeholders are invited to send their feedback to pds-epn@osfi-bsif.gc.ca. The feedback will help inform OSFI’s final guidance.