Canadian Fintech: Certn takes a selfie 🤳
Say goodbye to that sweeet sweet SR&ED money. Meet Coho the tech lender.
Morning!
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💰 Funding
Apparently investors think that bank data security is kinda important:
Cavelo raised $5m to help banks track who has access to sensitive data (credit card details, personally identifiable info, etc.) to reduce cyber risk.
DataStealth, a company that allows banks to identify and encrypt sensitive data received a majority investment from the Hyatt brothers, who founded and exited cybersecurity firm BlueCat.
Mortgage broker Pineapple raised USD $3.5m in their IPO on the NYSE.
🤝 M&A
Certn, a Victoria based background check provider acquired Trustmatic, a “selfie” identity verification tool similar to Onfido and Yoti. This finally allows Certn to sell into fintech and financial services clients, who require KYC and AML.
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🚀 Product
Account-to-account payments aka open banking payments aka pay-by-bank at checkout is heating up:
Amex partnered with Montreal based payments company Nuvei to distribute their new pay-by-bank product globally.
Plaid partnered with payment company Adyen to launch their pay-by-bank product in Canada.
Coho Growth, a lender to software companies launched in Vancouver. The entire team comes from TIMIA, another West Coast tech lender.
Crypto exchange Bitstamp is exiting Canada, joining Binance, Paxos, Blockchain.com.
⚖️ Policy
The Conservatives introduced a private member’s bill on Thursday in the House of Commons asking the federal (Liberal) government to show some progress on Open Banking. This is in addition to last week’s pro-Open Banking statements from the Ontario gov (also Conservative).
A recent ruling by the Canadian Tax Court may stop technology companies from “double dipping” on government assistance. Specifically it means that if you receive a government grant or low interest loan you cannot also claim SR&ED tax credits on the amount. This will hit Canadian fintechs hard.
📈 Stat of the week
$343,000 - the amount that Vancouver based crypto exchange Netcoins lost in a security breach. Add that to the $1.5m they lost 17 months prior 😬.
👀 Who’s hiring?
NetNow, SWE (Remote)
Plooto, Data Scientist (Remote)
Procurify, Implementation Manager (Remote)
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Investing? I’ll send you curated fintech deals every week here.
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Have a great week! See ya 👋