Canadian Fintech: Peloton buys their partner 💳
Wealthsimple launches private equity portfolio. Fairstone links up with Alterna. Mantle becomes the Carta of Canada.
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💰 Funding
Mantle, a tool to build cap tables and forecast equity dilution raised $10m. Calgary based competitor Solium, was acquired by Morgan Stanley for $1.1b in 2019.
Procurify a Vancouver based spend management platform raised $70m. The company allows finance teams to issue cards, onboard vendors, and write purchase orders.
The intersection between corporate card providers like Float and spend management software providers like Procurify continues to expand.
WonderFi, a rollup of multiple Canadian crypto exchanges has filed with the SEC to go public on the NASDAQ. This comes as the SEC is suing Coinbase, Binance and of course FTX.
🤝 M&A
Payment processor Peloton Technologies acquired their ISO partner Kiss Payments. What’s an ISO?
Independent Sales Organizations (ISO) act as middlemen between merchants (who want to accept online payments) and payment companies (who sell online payment services). Acquiring the company basically means that Peloton is absorbing their sales team and preventing Kiss from working with other payment processors.
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🚀 Product
In the least surprising Canadian tech story of all time, Le Panier Bleu, a Quebec government funded online marketplace featuring local products, is being called “redundant and near-useless” by the merchants it is intended to serve.
400 merchants are using the site.
It cost $12m to launch and manage 🤦.
Fig, an embedded lender owned by Fairstone Bank partnered with Alterna Savings. This is their first credit union client. To understand how Fig works, read this.
Wealthsimple now allows users to invest in private equity through a partnership with LGT. This is their third alternative asset portfolio after private credit and venture capital.
📈 Stat of the week
< 3 years: the tenure of Canada’s first female CEO of a Tier 1 Canadian bank.
Rania Llewellyn was hired to turnaround Laurentian Bank, a declining Quebec lender during the peak of Covid. In that time, the bank launched a mobile app, a credit card program in partnership with Brim, and online account opening.
This summer Laurentian launched a strategic review to prompt a sale, which did not find any buyers. Last month the bank suffered an IT outage, which abruptly led to Llewellyn’s resignation.
Her departure has been criticised as an example of the “glass cliff”, a phenomenon where women are promoted into leadership positions during times of crisis when the likelihood of failure is immense.
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