Canadian Fintech: Motusbank shuts down 🪦

Mar 31, 2025

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Styx Intelligence, a Vancouver based cybersecurity firm focused on phishing and brand impersonation scams raised $2.7m from BDC, Framework, Top Down Ventures, and Sprout Fund.
- Styx raised $1.6m in 2023.
- The founders sold their last cyber startup, Integrity-Paahi Solutions to Deloitte in 2016.
Sprout Family, a Toronto based fertility benefits platform for employers raised $1.7m from StandUp Ventures, Blue Collective, MaRS, The51 and Boon Fund.
- This is the second Toronto startup in the fertility finance space to receive funding in the last six months. Flora raised $1.5m to provide fertility insurance to Canadians that don’t have coverage through their employer.

Purpose Unlimited, a financial services firm run by Som Seif is acquiring Steadyhand, a Vancouver based low fee mutual fund with $1.3b in AUM.
- Purpose is aiming to hit $100b in the next 5 years across their advisor services, small business lending, digital assets, pension and retirement planning businesses.

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Motusbank, the digital bank owned by Meridian Credit Union, is shutting down.
- Meridian will acquire most of Motusbank’s Ontario based loans. Coast Capital will acquire all other loans as well as all deposit accounts.
- Motus launched in 2019 as a federal bank and at its peak served 16,000 clients.
- For reference, the other Canadian FI owned digital banks like Simplii (CIBC owned) and Tangerine (Scotiabank owned) both have around 2m.
Chexy, a tool to pay your rent with credit card, has expanded to tax remittance and bill payments.
Addy, a fractional real estate investment platform, became an exempt market dealer.
- Prior to this, they relied on third party dealers and a “crowdfunding exemption” to close transactions, which BC regulators took issue with. An EMD license allows Addy to offer more investment products and market them to investors.
Canadian Tire is linking their Triangle Rewards program to RBC’s Avion loyalty program.

According to the Globe, the Canadian subsidiary of China's largest bank, ICBK tried launching a new Canadian payment processing system to compete with Moneris.
- The goal of the project was to collect financial data from Chinese-Canadian consumers.
- The plan ultimately fizzled due to the pandemic.
Payments Canada announced that the technical build of the Real-Time Rail (RTR) system’s clearing and settlement component is 50% complete.
- The RTR, which was first announced in 2015 was last scheduled to go live in 2022, but is now slated for testing in 2026.

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