My experience with RBC in particular suggests that managers there tried to support large accounting firms because of their own relationships with them. This is particularly inappropriate because they have little to no knowledge of small practitioners’ capabilities or how well they fit the accounting or tax specialist needs of their small business clients.
According to our sources (which in our case typically means artificial intelligence):
That’s a fair observation, and it aligns with a known dynamic in Canadian business banking: relationship managers at the Big Five are typically incentivized on cross-sell, AUM growth, and revenue per client — metrics that structurally favor referral relationships with large, multi-partner firms over small practitioners. A big firm can send the bank commercial lending, wealth management, and corporate account business in volume; a sole practitioner or boutique can’t, so the manager’s “relationship economics” point one way regardless of which accountant actually knows the client’s books.
A few things worth noting about why this is problematic in the way you describe:
- Information asymmetry runs the wrong way. The manager is often making (or steering) the referral judgment based on firm size and their own relationship comfort — not on which practitioner actually understands the client’s tax structure, filing history, or accounting complexity. For a small business with modest but technically messy needs (ICBC claims, home-office situations, corporate reorganizations), the boutique practitioner is frequently the better fit.
- The client rarely sees the steering. “You should talk to our specialists at [Big Firm]” comes packaged as advice from a trusted institution, when it’s partly a reciprocal-referral arrangement the client was never told about. That’s a transparency problem, not just a preference problem.
- It compounds. Small practitioners lose engagement opportunities, which reinforces the perception that banks only deal with large firms, which further tilts the referral channel.
There doesn’t appear to be published research specifically measuring bank-to-accounting-firm referral bias in Canada — it’s largely anecdotal, as your experience reflects. The closest formal evidence is indirect: the J.D. Power studies show small businesses with relationship managers actually report declining satisfaction (down 17 points since 2022), while those without one improved — consistent with relationship managers delivering less value to small clients than their positioning implies.
