How Sun Life will support the recent Capital Accumulation Plan (CAP) Guideline changes

February 20, 2025

Following the recent updates to Guideline No. 3 for Capital Accumulation Plans (CAPs) by the Canadian Association of Pension Supervisory Authorities (CAPSA), we’re pleased to share details on specific areas of impact.

Here are highlights of key changes, and how we’ll support Clients in meeting industry best practices under the new guideline by January 1, 2026.

Why are we doing this?

Implementing changes or enhancements to align with the new guidelines helps ensure that plan sponsors remain compliant. Although changes to support the guideline must be in place by January 1, 2026, we’re working to ensure that key changes are implemented in advance.

What are the changes?

We’re ready to support plan sponsors in the following areas:

1. Expanded list of plan member responsibilities

We’ll promote the new responsibilities for plan members on a dedicated section within mysunlife.ca, in plan member booklets, enrolment guides and on statements. These updates will be in place by November 2025.

2. Plan member statements

Our plan member statements are built to include many optional modules. This flexibility means Sun Life can easily turn on previously optional modules member statements, to display the new information. This will be in place for the December 2025 annual statements. We’ll communicate with plan sponsors in advance of this change.

3. Maintaining oversight of a CAP

Sun Life is ready to support plan sponsors with our CAP Certificate, CAPsure, and CAP readiness documents. For easy access, these documents will be available on the Plan Sponsor Services secure site by the end of Q1 2025.

4. Reviewing plan and governance framework

Our Planalytics™ reporting provides data that can help with plan review, and we’ll be enhancing our Retirement Readiness reports by Q3 2025.

We’ll continue to keep you updated on these initiatives in support of the guideline.

Questions? We’re here to help.

For questions, please contact your Group Retirement Services representative.