Eli Yufest plans to put his marketing experience to work as ETF industry looks to maintain momentum
Eli Yufest isn’t an insider. The newly appointed executive director of the Canadian ETF Association (CETFA) has spent his 20+ year career in marketing across a range of industries and positions. From politics and policy to consumer packaged goods through financial services, Yufest has worked through strategy, market research, and data analytics to help industries reach clients. He plans to apply those skills to Canadian ETFs.
Yufest outlined his core goals with CETFA and his mandate within the organization. He highlighted some of the gaps that he sees Canadian ETFs needing to fill now, as well as where he and the CETFA board want to target as growth areas for the industry. He highlighted how he plans to manage advisor outreach and what advisors can expect to come out of CETFA over the next few months and years.
“Given my broad range of expertise across numerous verticals on all things related to marketing and strategy and business, the board decided I would be a good fit for their sort of renewed focus on the brand and the association,” Yufest says. “My plan is to help educate stakeholders about ETFs. That includes a whole host of people, including advisors. I want to help every stakeholder get a better understanding of the benefits of ETFs.”
While Yufest notes that his role doesn’t have firm KPIs set now, education has become his watchword. For retail investors who have only a cursory familiarity with ETFs, his plan is to help make a more robust introduction. For advisors who have a stronger idea of ETFs and how to use them, he hopes to introduce some of the more sophisticated and innovative strategies that have been launched as ETFs in recent years.
While ETFs have had much of the momentum in terms of asset flows in recent years, Yufest admits that he has a bit of a mountain to climb. Canadian ETFs hold around $500 billion in assets, while Canadian mutual funds still hold over $2 trillion. The way Yufest sees it, mutual funds occupy a far bigger share of the consumer’s mind than ETFs. He wants to flip that.
“A lot of consumers, advisors, and investors know about ETFs but that’s still a relatively small number compared to mutual funds, around five times smaller,” Yufest says. “I think there’s an opportunity to grow the share of mind and the understanding of ETFs.”
Yufest admits that the wind is at his industry’s back right now. ETF flows have trounced mutual fund flows for six of the last seven years. While mutual funds saw their first year of positive net sales since 2021 last year ETFs still attracted more assets. Where he wants to grow, initially at least, is in the common trust Canadians place in ETFs. While he sees long-term growth in education on more sophisticated strategies and advantages, Yufest wants to see ordinary Canadians develop a high degree of familiarity and trust with ETFs.
That education, Yufest explains, will take myriad forms. From traditional advertising and communications campaigns, to conferences, through podcasts, white papers, and thought leadership content writing. That also involves an overhaul of CETFA’s social media strategy. He’s already engaging in the debate as to whether CETFA and other ETF advocates should build a presence on newer social media channels like TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram.
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Currently CETFA is only on LinkedIn and X (formerly Twitter). Yufest notes that demographically, ETF investors tend to skew younger than their mutual fund-holding equivalents. He believes that his industry should look to establish a presence where those younger people are.
Regulation will be another area of focus for Yufest, as regulations around fees, disclosures, structures, and asset strategies continue to impact the ETF industry and investors’ views. He wants to be a source for advisors navigating their own KYP regulations. As part of his educational efforts, he wants CETFA to offer more robust information for consumers of all sophistication levels and becoming a one-stop-shop for KYP information is part of that goal.
As advisors look for those resources from CETFA, Yufest wants them to take a whole new view of his organization.
“If you look at where the organization was a year ago, it had a completely different organization of the board and a different executive director,” Yufest says. “Now we have renewed focus, a board with different stakeholders from the ecosystem, and a renewed sense of vigour and effort that we can become that source of impartial information for advisors, consumers, and regulators. I would tell advisors to look at where we were six months ago and look at we are now.”
