Decades in, still meeting people: one finance professional’s rule for networking

Ade Tayo has lived in Canada for decades. On a Wednesday evening in September, he went to a networking event in Toronto and explained why he still goes to events like it. “To meet people, get contacts, and connect with them more,” he said.

Tayo works in finance and helps people with financial and tax planning. He went to the Strive Networking event on Sept. 23^rd, 2026 at Big Trouble with a simple aim. If business comes from a conversation, he said, that is good. If he can help someone with something, that is good too. At events like this one, he said, “You never know what you will get,” so he tries to stay open.

That is his rule: meet people first and let business follow. Trust comes before clients.

Most of Tayo’s clients come from his own community, he said, and from people who know people who know him. He ties that to trust. A person hires someone they have reason to believe. He also meets some clients at networking events, which is why I was there too.

His approach fits that pace. A first talk at a networking night gives a person little reason to trust a stranger with their money. Tayo treats it as a start. Building trust requires getting to know each other and that takes time.

He also does not treat the event as a place to sell. He said he wants to learn more about the people he meets and see how he can help them.

His circle reaches beyond one community. Tayo is Nigerian, and he said he has close friends who are Haitian and Jamaican. He described the people he deals with as a diverse group. That could also be seen as a description of my own network: made up of people from several places and still based on who knows who.

Others in the room, at other stages

Tayo was not the only person in the room, and the others had varied reasons to be there. He has been here for many years, but how about the experiences of people who have just arrived, or came to country recently? Two other attendees shared their stories of various stages of the job hunt in the wake of AI.

A finance professional who also trades stocks had been in Canada four days. He had come from Italy and he said he came to meet peers and start building relationships. That is a fast start. It is also a test of what a networking night can do for someone who has just arrived: it can put a person in the room. It cannot tell them which work will survive, which skills an employer will want, or whether a contact will turn into a job.

A data engineer who moved to Toronto this year has not yet found work. He has interviews in other cities over the next three weeks. Data engineers help build, run, and organize the systems that use data. Statistics Canada found that coding-intensive jobs, such as software engineers and web designers, grew at about the same rate as other jobs from November 2022 to December 2025. The gains were concentrated among workers aged 30 to 49. The number of coding professionals under 30 stayed flat.

Statistics Canada researchers estimated that about 60% of employees in Canada hold jobs that AI could change. About half of that group are in jobs where AI may help workers do the job, so exposure does not mean a person will lose a job.

Finance is one of several fields with high exposure. In finance and insurance, more than half of employees held jobs where AI could do key tasks and gave workers little help doing them. Tayo and the trader both work in finance.

Tayo’s view of AI is practical. He called AI a tool “That will come, whether we like it or not.” People who learn how it works in their own field will do better, and he compares the excitement and worry around AI to the early years of the internet. While some people misuse it, people will adapt, and some will build new products to deal with those harms. AI agents (programs that can carry out tasks once you give them access) are now coming to the mainstream.  Tayo has had some experience with one and said that how fast it works is “Crazy!”

The Toronto job market looks better than a year ago. The unemployment rate (which is the share of people in the work force who are looking for work and cannot find it) was 6.7% in the Toronto area in August. It was 9.0% in July 2025. Yet the data engineer is still searching. This can be seen in one of two ways: a city-wide rate can improve while one person’s search takes longer, or a lower rate may not reach every field equally. It is hard to say which is the accurate read though.

For Caribbean readers, Statistics Canada has details by place of birth. In the 2021 census, Black immigrants born in the Caribbean, aged 25 to 54, had an unemployment rate of 9.6%. For all Black people in that age group, it was 11.8%, and for all Canadians in that age group it was 8.3%. The figures date from the pandemic, when Statistics Canada says racialized groups were hit harder, and they cover only Black immigrants born in the Caribbean.

Strive Networking launched in November 2023. The company says it has hosted more than 28,000 attendees at events in 119 cities in nine countries. Events run in each city about every six to 12 weeks, always on Wednesdays from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m.

Seen side by side, the four people did three plain things. They went in person. They went with a modest aim: to meet people, to build contacts, or to find peers. None of them reported a job from the night. Tayo, who has the most experience of the four, framed it as a habit. He goes, he meets people, and he sees what follows.