Canadian Fintech: Laurentian Exits Another Business Line 👋
Manzil hits milestone. Koho, Addy & EQ Bank launch new products.
Good morning! Welcome back to Canadian Fintech, a newsletter for founders, operators & investors.
I’ll be off for the next two Mondays on my honeymoon ❤️. If you’ve got recommendations for Oaxaca or Puerto Escondido, send em over!
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💰 Funding
YouSet, an insurance comparison platform, raised $3.5m from angel investors.
The Montreal based company plans to expand out of Ontario & Quebec, into BC later this year.
Tmrw, a peer-to-peer bitcoin payment app raised $1.8m.
The Canadian founders previously launched Knox Custody, which was partially acquired two years ago by Tetra Trust, a custodian for digital assets.
🤝 M&A
Laurentian Bank is selling its discount brokerage business to CI Financial.
Earlier this year, Laurentian also sold off its full service retail brokerage business to iA Financial.
Combined, the two brokerage books were $2.25b in assets and serviced 2,066 client accounts.
After a rocky 2023, the bank recently laid out a “revamped strategic plan” to cut back non-core businesses and refocus on commercial lending.
AutoScout24, a European car marketplace, is acquiring Trader Canada from its private equity owner Thoma Bravo.
Trader owns several softwares used by automotive dealers & lenders such as AutoTrader, Dealertrack, VinSolutions & Kelley Blue Book.
Trader also acquired Teranet’s collateral management registry earlier this year.
Book4Time, a revenue management platform for the hospitality industry, was acquired by Agilysys, a US hospitality tech firm for $204m.
Book4Time provides payment processing, loyalty program management, and price optimization to spas and resorts.
Bitfarms, a Toronto based bitcoin miner is acquiring US competitor Stronghold Digital for $236m.
Bitcoin miners have seen a surge in value because their equipment can also power AI data centres.
A MESSAGE FROM THE SUSTAINABLE FINANCE SUMMIT
Canada’s largest sustainable finance conference is back!
🚀 Product
Manzil, a halal finance company crossed $50m in mortgages.
AutoCanada, a car dealership franchise, suffered a cyber security breach.
Earlier this summer thousands of North American dealerships were out of service thanks to a cyberattack against CDK, a major dealership software vendor.
CIBC is on a heater with AI announcements:
Launched internal AI tools for employees to summarize documents, compose emails, and generate meeting summaries.
Licensed Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot, to help developers write code.
Financed $10m of growth capital to Boosted.ai, a Toronto based AI software for investment management.
Recruiting 200 AI focused employees over the next year.
Participating in the AI stream of UofT’s Creative Destruction Lab.
Europ Assistance, a travel insurance provider owned by Italian insurer Generali, has launched in Canada.
Addy, a platform to buy & sell fractional real estate properties, now offers fractional real estate loans on its platform.
Koho launched two products for renters:
Reporting rent payments to Equifax
Tenant insurance via Walnut
EQ Bank launched a laneway home mortgage product… and yet I still can’t afford buy in Toronto 😭
Quickly, an invoice financing company with clients in the home improvement industry partnered with BuildBase, an ERP system for homebuilders.
Wealthica, a dashboard that aggregates retail investment accounts, expanded into the US.
TD reported its first quarterly loss since 2003.
The bank set aside $3.5b billion to cover fines from its US money laundering scandal.
📈 Stat of the week
29% - the percentage of Canadian publishers who think that credit cards will see the biggest uptick in sales across all consumer financial products this year.
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Have a great week! See ya 👋