Local founders say the country’s payments reboot and AI breakthroughs could put B.C. at the centre of financial innovation.
One day before the Bank of Canada announced it had approved the country’s first payment service providers under the new Retail Payment Activities Act, leaders from Vancouver’s growing sector gathered for a conversation that felt prescient. At #VTJLive: The Fintech Frontier – Disruption, Trust & Transformation, hosted by Vancouver Tech Journal in partnership with the BC Securities Commission, three founders and one regulator explored what it will take to build financial technology that earns trust, scales responsibly, and keeps pace with global innovation.
Canada’s fintech moment, finally
Moderator Khalil Jessa, senior legal counsel for capital markets regulation at the BCSC, opened by asking how the panelists viewed the state of fintech in Canada. Ugan Naidoo, co-founder and CTO of INETCO, didn’t hesitate: “We lag in terms of technology,” he said, noting how real-time payments and related infrastructure remain well behind other markets. But that, he argued, creates opportunity. “Agentic commerce”—AI systems that can act autonomously to perform complex banking tasks—could transform how money moves, from fraud prevention to transaction settlement.
For Connor Turland, CEO and co-founder of Ceedar, the gap between Canada and global peers is both a challenge and an opening. “We have to overcome the brain drain to San Francisco,” he said. “There’s a huge vacuum of opportunity here because there are so many gaps.” He added that Canada’s long-delayed move toward open banking could signal a turning point for entrepreneurs ready to build “well-connected, well-integrated financial platforms.”
Katherina Cortes, CRO at Mahalo App, framed Canada’s fintech potential through the lens of user experience. Her Vancouver-based startup built an NFC-enabled card that allows anyone to accept tips, donations, or payments with a tap—an idea rooted in financial inclusion. “Technology has to serve the attention span and patience people actually have,” she said. “We’re going back to the human aspect of payments.”
AI’s expanding role in finance
AI dominated much of the discussion, from operational automation to customer experience. Naidoo explained how large language models can be trained to act like fraud analysts—pulling data across systems, interpreting transactions, and making decisions in real time. “These are tasks humans would have done, but AI can handle the repetitive processes,” he said.
Turland, whose company builds an AI-driven bookkeeping platform, agreed that automation is inevitable but argued the advantage lies in empathy and accessibility. “Accounting is full of jargon,” he said. “We wanted to build something that business owners just get—that feels friendly, intuitive, and human.”
For Cortes, AI is the foundation of Mahalo’s future roadmap. Beyond enabling digital tipping, the company plans to use AI for credit scoring and lending tools aimed at underbanked workers. “We started with helping people who weren’t getting cash anymore,” she said. “Now we’re looking at how to make that loop complete—receive, pay, lend.”
Open banking and regulation
Few topics drew as much energy as regulation and data access. “It’s still super difficult for entrepreneurs to connect bank accounts,” Turland said. “Screen scraping is still the state of the art in Canada. There are no APIs to banking data.” He called the upcoming federal legislation a chance to rebuild trust and efficiency: “People deserve it, and Canada can’t keep lagging forever.”
Naidoo added that open banking will expand both innovation and risk. “It extends the attack surface,” he warned. “It allows the good people to access data—but also the bad people. That’s why security innovation will be critical.”
Cortes shared Mahalo’s experience securing FINTRAC approval early, even when the company’s initial product didn’t technically require it. “It was a big chunk of work, but it put us ahead,” she said. “Regulation can slow you down, but it can also build credibility.”
Jessa, representing the regulator’s view, noted that compliance doesn’t have to stifle innovation. “We’re seeing startups come to us earlier,” he said, citing the BCSC’s current pilot testing electronic KYC for open banking. “That kind of collaboration is what we want to see.”
Investor sentiment and the currency of trust
After the investment boom of 2021, panelists described a market that’s more cautious but still active. “Investors are more discerning,” Naidoo said. “They want spectacular value propositions—and proof you’ve built trust.”
Both Ceedar and Mahalo credited early believers rather than institutions for getting them off the ground. Turland turned customers into investors after they’d used the product. “Seeing is believing,” he said. “When people experience something tangible, they write the cheque.”
Cortes said Mahalo’s backers, including several family offices, were motivated by the company’s mission. “They invested because of the why—financial inclusion,” she said. Still, she acknowledged the conservative nature of Canadian capital: “We might have to look outside the country for our next round.”
When asked what advice they’d offer to new founders, all three returned to the same theme: trust. “It’s difficult to accelerate the process of gaining trust,” said Turland. “Move at the pace that trust moves.” Cortes added, “Listen to your team and your customers—they build your business.” And Naidoo closed the conversation simply: “Avoid the hype. One customer at a time, you’ll get there.”
Article originally published in Vancouver Tech Journal, October 24, 2025