Canadian Fintech: National Bank of (Western) Canada 🤠
CreditApp takes on Dealertrack. Open banking groundhog day. Float launches new products.
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💰 Funding
CreditApp, a portal for connecting car dealerships and auto lenders, raised $2.7m.
🤝 M&A
Canadian Western Bank, Canada’s 8th largest lender was acquired by National Bank, the 6th largest for $5b. Why?
Growth outside of Quebec: Today, a quarter of NBC’s assets are outside of Quebec. This deal gives them a huge bump! CWB has 65k customers & 39 branches in Western Canada & Ontario.
Growth in commercial finance: CWB is a powerhouse in equipment and specialty finance. They’ll boost NBC’s non-Quebec loan book by 37%.
Growth in wealth: CWB has $10b in wealth assets. They’ve done a great job cross selling wealth services to their commercial clients.
Staging Labs, a Canadian founded startup to block malicious crypto transactions was acquired by US based Merkle Science.
Copperleaf, an enterprise capital planning and budgeting software was acquired by IFS.
Copperleaf is Vancouver based and was publicly traded on the TSX.
🚀 Product
Metronome, a platform that monitors home appliances (ex. HVAC) and predict when they need to be replaced, launched in beta.
They came out of stealth at the end of last year.
Float launched bill pay and employee reimbursement.
These features further push Float beyond just a corporate card and towards a financial ops platform for businesses.
Addy, a fractional real estate investment platform has onboarded its first real estate fund.
Until now, Addy only allowed issuers to list one-off properties on their marketplace, to which investors could purchase shares for as low as $1.
Now, issuers can list funds (a portfolio of one-off properties) to tiny investors.
Whether it’s a fund or a one-off property, the real innovation here is the fractionalization of alternative investments, making these products more accessible to non accredited investors. Obsiido & Wealthsimple have also done a good job of this.
Layer 6, the AI research division of TD launched pilot programs that use AI to:
speed up approvals for simple mortgage and life insurance application;
improve customer service response times;
support code development for engineers.
TD, BMO & RBC are all ranked in the top 10 globally for AI research by banks.
⚖️ Policy
The Bank for International Settlements (BIS), which provides services to central banks around the world, is opening an office in Toronto that will act as an Americas HQ.
At a conference in Toronto, Finance Canada announced that an open banking framework will be launched at the end of 2025.
The Liberals made a similar commitment back in 2021 to implement open banking no later than 2023.
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Have a great week! See ya 👋