Canadian Fintech: Digital Dealerships 🚗
Why CGI acquired Celero. A new Canadian crypto group. Planned lands $48m.
Good morning! Welcome back to Canadian Fintech, a newsletter for founders, operators & investors.
If you missed it, last week I published our first ever market map, visualizing Canadian fintechs in the AP / AR automation space. Check it out and let me know which industry you’d like me to cover next.
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💰 Funding
Clutch, a digital car dealership, received a $10m strategic investment from iA Financial, a large automotive lender & insurer.
The deal gives iA a new online channel to sell their auto warranty products.
This reminds me of another strategic investment in the digital dealership space in 2022. Then Goeasy, a Canadian lender invested $40m in Canada Drives, to become the preferred subprime financier for their borrowers.
CPP, Canada’s largest pension fund, purchased a 20% stake in b2b invoicing platform Team Blue for $800m.
Planned, an online booking platform for business events and travel raised $48m.
Lalonde, the founder of Hopper, a Montreal based late stage online travel agency, will join their board.
🤝 M&A
CGI, a Montreal based bank IT consulting firm acquired Celero, a provider of managed tech services to over 90 Canadian credit unions.
Celero was established as a joint venture between the three Prairie Centrals to provide core banking services to credit unions in those provinces.
Historically each province had its own credit union central, which provided infrastructure like cheque clearing and ATM management for multiple local institutions that were too small to build / buy these systems themselves.
🚀 Product
Merrco, a payment provider to the Cannabis industry, is rebranding to KORT. Apaylo, Clearly, and Cova also compete in this space.
Goose, a Vancouver based insurance provider is rebranding in the US as SmartBunny… a much less Canadian animal 🪿
Fig, an embedded personal lender is now offering loans directly to consumers.
RBC is restructuring it’s P&C banking group into separate personal banking and commercial banking divisions as it integrates HSBC.
Hiive, a marketplace for private companies to sell pre-IPO shares, launched an index of large cap private companies.
⚖️ Policy
OSFI has given banks a 1 year extension before they must increase capital reserves as part of international reforms under Basel III. The proposed increase has also seen push back in the EU and US.
The Bank of Canada said that due to the decline of cash, Canada will “likely” need a digital currency to maintain monetary sovereignty. This is the strongest pro CBDC statement the central bank has ever made.
“Stand with Crypto” an advocacy group has launched in Canada. Canada already has similar industry groups like Web3 Council, Blockchain Consortium, and the Canadian Lenders Association’s Crypto Finance Roundtable.
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Have a great week! See ya 👋