Canadian Fintech: Laurentian's Path Forward 🚧
The buy-now-pay-laterification of insurance. Relay raises $44m. Faith based financial services.
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💰 Funding
Apollo, an embedded insurance provider, raised an $18.5m credit facility to launch “BNPL for policy premium payments” called FinShore.
Apollo is best known for their tenant insurance and is embedded directly into Yardy, one of the largest property management platforms globally.
Last week I wrote about Teal and the evolution of Canadian embedded fintech. Apollo neatly fits into this trend.
Relay, a small business banking fintech, raised $44m.
Relay is one of two major Canadian fintechs founded in Toronto that only services the US market. The other, NorthOne raised $92m in 2022 and moved their HQ to NY.
Maxa, a Montreal based platform for aggregating & analysing ERP data (finance & ops data), raised $28m.
🤝 M&A
Realtax & Ontario Tax Sales, two companies that help municipalities manage property tax arrears have merged.
When someone stops paying property taxes, the local government can register the property as overdue and eventually sell the home to recover the owed amount.
Servicing & collection is one of the unsexy areas of fintech that really matter. Poorly managed arrears in credit, insurance or payment can sink a profitable company (or in this case, gum up an understaffed local government).
Cannacord Genuity, a Toronto based wealth management firm & investment bank acquired Cantab Asset Management, UK based financial planning firm with $1.5b under management.
🚀 Product
Lighthouse, Canada’s first Credit Union for the Jewish community launched in Toronto.
There is a history of faith based financial services in Canada. From Dutch settlers in Alberta forming the Christian Credit Union in the late 1940s. To this year’s federal budget referencing halal mortgages, a sharia compliant financial product for muslim Canadians.
Equifax Canada is considering using payday loan data in their credit scores. Payday lenders do not typically report tradelines to the bureaus.
Laurentian Bank formally released their “revamped strategic plan”, with ambitious double digit growth targets, following last year’s board shakeup, 5 day service outage scandal, and a failed sale attempt. As I’ve written before, the bank will prioritise commercial lending and make investments into tech & ops. My thoughts here are probably rosier than most:
A week-long service outage is unforgivable, but I’d argue that strategically Laurentian was on the right path before their CEO was removed.
During Rania Llewellyn’s 3 year tenure, she launched a mobile app; a credit card program with Brim; and online account opening. By bank standards that's Usain Bolt level product innovation.
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Have a great week! See ya 👋