Aug 15, 2026 | NCFA Fintech Whisperer | Cybersecurity Fraud And Financial Crime, Capital Markets Infrastructure And Funding, Wealthtech Investing And Trading, Digital Assets Blockchain And Tokenization, Cross Border Payments And FX, Regulation And Policy, Insurance And Insurtech, Treasury Liquidity And Cash Management, Artificial Intelligence And Data, SME Finance And Business Banking, Risk Compliance And Regtech
Comptroller Jonathan Gould said the OCC received 40 applications for new bank charters during roughly the previous 18 months, with 23 business plans involving some form of digital asset activity.
Gould said payment stablecoins are becoming an ordinary part of the prospective charter pipeline as applicants integrate digital assets into regulated banking models.
The OCC is also implementing its responsibilities under the GENIUS Act and expects to issue a final payment stablecoin rule by November.
The numbers show digital assets becoming part of bank formation rather than remaining mainly an activity added to established institutions. More than half of the OCC's recent charter applications include digital asset activity, extending the same infrastructure-ownership question behind Ripple's U.S. bank charter application across a much larger applicant pool. These are applications, not approved banks, but the pipeline shows how many digital asset firms are trying to bring licensing, custody, payments and stablecoin activity inside regulated banking structures.
The Monetary Authority of Singapore introduced a package of measures intended to strengthen Singapore's competitiveness as an international asset-management centre.
The package includes a proposed tax exemption for qualifying profit-related returns earned by fund-management professionals and a MAS investment programme focused on hedge-fund managers operating in Singapore.
Singapore will also introduce an Investment Management Track under the Overseas Networks & Expertise Pass to support recruitment of experienced investment-management professionals.
Singapore is combining tax policy, institutional capital and immigration settings to compete for asset managers and investment talent. The package goes beyond licensing or regulatory simplification by addressing where firms locate teams, where experienced professionals work and whether managers can build enough local scale to anchor investment activity in Singapore. That makes asset-management competitiveness an industrial-policy question as well as a financial-services one.
The Canadian Securities Administrators says hundreds of listed issuers raised almost C$4 billion during the first year after limits under the Listed Issuer Financing Exemption were increased, an eightfold increase in the pace of capital raising compared with the original limits.
CSA members issued 763 investor alerts, cautions and warnings during the reporting period, with more than 85% related to crypto assets, and deactivated 11,728 malicious websites representing 19,860 URLs.
The CSA says Project Tokenization engaged more than 240 organizations while regulators also continued examining stablecoins, prediction markets and the use of AI in capital markets.
The report provides unusually concrete evidence on both sides of Canada's securities-policy agenda. Regulators are lowering friction in parts of the capital-raising system while expanding technology-enabled fraud disruption and examining new digital market structures. The C$4 billion raised under the expanded exemption strengthens the question of who gets capital as funding channels multiply because it gives regulators measurable evidence that changing financing limits can alter how Canadian public companies access capital.
The Bank of Canada's August 18 publication of three enforcement notices brought its public Retail Payment Activities Act list to nine payment service providers.
Each notice records a section 23 violation for performing retail payment activities without submitting a registration application.
The Bank imposed no administrative monetary penalty in the nine published cases. The notices remain public for five years.
An internal review maintained the nature of Equals Money's violation and its zero-dollar penalty, while finding that the Act did not authorize replacing the notice with a warning letter.
As NCFA's review of the RPAA notices explains, a zero-dollar penalty still creates a durable public compliance record. Registration checks now belong in partner onboarding, procurement, investor diligence and market-access planning for payment firms serving Canada.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission proposed Regulation Crypto Assets, a tailored securities offering regime for certain investment contracts involving crypto assets.
A proposed startup exemption would permit offerings of up to US$5 million during a four-year period, while a fundraising exemption would allow offerings of up to US$75 million during each 12-month period.
Issuers would face principles-based disclosure requirements and remain subject to federal antifraud and antimanipulation rules. The proposal also includes a conditional safe harbour addressing when a crypto asset would no longer be treated as subject to an investment contract.
The SEC is moving from defining how securities law applies to crypto toward creating specific capital-raising pathways for the sector. Its March crypto market structure interpretation established a classification and lifecycle framework; Regulation Crypto Assets would add tailored exemptions that qualifying issuers could use to raise capital within it. If adopted, the rules could materially change how early stage crypto ventures fund development, what they must disclose and how token-based fundraising competes with established private-market exemptions.
The U.S. Treasury issued a proposed rule to implement Section 3 of the GENIUS Act governing the issuance, offering and sale of payment stablecoins in the United States.
The proposal defines when an issuer would need an appropriate federal or state GENIUS licence and when a payment stablecoin is considered offered or sold to a person in the United States.
Treasury says the Act is expected to take effect January 18, 2027, with additional restrictions beginning July 18, 2028 on digital asset service providers offering payment stablecoins that are not issued by licensed issuers.
The proposal turns the GENIUS Act from legislation into an operating framework for stablecoin issuers and the platforms that distribute their tokens. The definitions of where issuance occurs, which issuers need a licence and when a stablecoin is being offered into the U.S. market will determine how domestic and foreign providers structure access. For exchanges, wallets and payment platforms, compliance will increasingly depend on the regulatory status of the stablecoins they make available, not only on their own licences.
Calgary based Helcim closed a C$53 million Series C led by BDC Capital's Growth Venture Fund, with Curql Collective, Gold House Ventures and existing investors participating.
Helcim says it serves more than 22,000 active merchants, has passed C$150 million in annual revenue and expects to process nearly C$10 billion in payments during 2026.
The company plans to invest in payment software, hardware and integrations while expanding into vendor payments and tools for managing everyday business finances.
Helcim is using a 22,000 merchant distribution base to extend beyond payment acceptance into more of the financial workflow around small businesses. Vendor payments and business finance could increase revenue per merchant while putting Helcim into closer competition with processors, banks and software platforms that already bundle payments with operating tools. Nearly C$10 billion in expected annual volume gives that expansion enough scale to watch.
Modulr became a direct participant in CHAPS and can now settle high value, same day payments directly at the Bank of England.
The Bank of England lists Modulr FS Limited among its CHAPS direct participants. Payment obligations between participants settle individually through real time gross settlement on the day they are submitted.
With existing direct connections to Faster Payments and Bacs, Modulr is the only UK non-bank payment service provider with direct access to all three major domestic payment schemes.
Direct participation removes an intermediary from Modulr’s CHAPS settlement process and gives it more control over payment routing and liquidity. The development offers a useful comparison with Canada’s expanding non-bank rail access, where membership and system participation determine how much infrastructure control payment providers can obtain.
Payment Asia Group announced that its Canadian business AlphaPay completed the acquisition and integration of Canadian payment provider Motion Pay.
The combination brings Motion Pay's merchant network and operating resources into AlphaPay's platform, which supports international wallets and Canadian payment methods including Interac, Visa and Mastercard.
Payment Asia also disclosed a recent Canadian money services business registration as it expands local and cross-border payment services in North America.
The integration gives AlphaPay more Canadian merchant distribution while connecting domestic payment acceptance with Payment Asia's international payment capabilities. The strategic value will depend on whether the combined business can convert that larger merchant footprint into meaningful transaction volume and cross-border activity. The regulatory point also requires precision: Canadian MSBs are registered with FINTRAC, so the company's use of the term "MSB licence" should not be read as a separate banking or payment licence.
Nium launched domestic U.S. card issuance, extending its issuing platform into North America alongside existing capabilities across APAC, Europe and the Middle East.
The company says businesses can combine local U.S. card issuance with its payment infrastructure spanning more than 190 countries through one platform.
Nium issued more than 41 million card credentials across APAC, the Middle East and Europe during the previous 12 months, and its U.S. offering includes physical, virtual, single-use and multi-use credentials.
Domestic U.S. issuance gives Nium another local component inside a payment network already built for international use. Businesses operating across regions can reduce the number of separate issuing integrations they maintain while combining card programmes with cross-border payouts. That matters most in sectors such as travel and supplier payments, where one transaction can require several payment methods across multiple countries.
The Reserve Bank of New Zealand opened a public consultation on upgrading the country’s retail-payment infrastructure. Responses are due by October 27, 2026.
About NZ$2 trillion in retail payments passes between New Zealand bank accounts annually, yet the country remains one of the few developed economies without a real-time retail-payment system.
The consultation covers instant 24-hour payments, fraud safeguards, faster cross-border transactions, competition, technology adoption and clearer responsibility for system-wide planning.
New Zealand is still considering the architecture and governance of infrastructure that Canada has placed into approved rules through its Real-Time Rail framework. Payment providers have an early opportunity to address access, fraud responsibilities, interoperability and the role of nonbanks before New Zealand selects its modernization approach.
The European Central Bank opened an expression of interest process to refine the standards needed for offline digital euro functionality.
The technical work examines deployment through embedded Secure Elements and embedded SIMs in smartphones, with participation sought from equipment manufacturers, mobile operators, virtual network operators and standards organizations.
Selected participants will assess the maturity, industry support and implementation constraints of the proposed standards. Applications are due September 25, ahead of a digital euro pilot planned for the second half of 2027.
Offline capability makes hardware compatibility, mobile operator participation and secure deployment part of payment infrastructure design. The consultation gives payment providers and technology companies a direct route into the standards discussion before the pilot begins.
Stripe launched Treasury in Australia, allowing businesses to accept payments, hold and convert funds and pay recipients from the same Stripe environment.
Businesses can receive and hold AUD, USD, GBP and EUR, convert across 10 supported currencies and use incoming revenue to pay suppliers, contractors and third parties in nearly 100 countries.
Stripe also plans to bring Treasury for Platforms to Australia later in 2026, allowing platforms to embed financial accounts for their own customers.
Stripe is reducing the separation between payment acceptance and treasury operations for businesses already using its platform. Revenue can become available for supplier and contractor payments without first being transferred through a separate external banking workflow, while currency conversion stays inside the same system. Treasury for Platforms would extend that model further by letting software platforms distribute account functionality directly to their customers.
Anchorage Digital launched Agentic Banking, institutional infrastructure designed to let organizations fund and control AI agents interacting with financial assets.
The platform applies corporate spending policies, Know Your Agent identity standards and real time compliance controls before settlement across stablecoins, fiat rails or tokenized credentials.
Anchorage is working with Google Cloud on cloud based key management and transaction infrastructure that combines Google's AI capabilities with Anchorage Digital's regulated custody and settlement services.
Giving an AI agent access to capital requires controls over identity, authority, spending limits, compliance and settlement before the transaction happens. Anchorage is putting those controls inside regulated banking infrastructure, extending the issues already emerging around AI payment consent and liability into institutional treasury and digital asset workflows. Banks, payment firms and fintech platforms now have a clearer benchmark for what controlled agent access to money can look like.
Binance launched Agent OS, a standardized developer layer connecting AI applications to its market data, account information, trading, wallet, payment and on-chain infrastructure.
Users can assign agents to dedicated subaccounts, configure permissions and revoke access, while supported agents can retrieve market and portfolio information and place trades within those controls.
The platform combines Binance APIs, Wallet Agentic Hub, x402 programmable payments, Skill Hub and Model Context Protocol support so developers do not need separate integrations for each financial capability.
Agent OS puts AI applications closer to financial actions rather than limiting them to analysis or recommendations. The important control boundary is between what an external agent decides and what Binance permits it to execute. That connects directly to the growing AI governance and compliance burden around authorization, audit trails, transaction limits and accountability when agents can act on financial infrastructure.
Ant International introduced FalconTST 2.0, the latest version of its time-series foundation model for forecasting financial and operational data.
The model is being applied with financial institutions including Barclays, Citi, Deutsche Bank and Standard Chartered across forecasting use cases.
Ant International has also made the Falcon 2.0 API available and maintains an open implementation of the FalconTST model family for time-series forecasting.
Financial AI is extending beyond conversational tools into models designed specifically for numerical sequences such as liquidity, transaction flows and other time-dependent financial data. Adoption by global banks gives the model more significance than a research release alone because forecasting accuracy can affect treasury, risk and operating decisions. That also raises the AI compliance burden around model validation, data quality, oversight and evidence when specialist models influence financial decisions.
Sun Life says its generative AI Notes Assistant can summarize client meetings, compile action items and draft follow-up emails, saving advisors an estimated 15 to 30 minutes per client session.
An AI powered advisor concierge launched in July has already been used in more than 11,000 client conversations to help advisors retrieve information on products, policies and processes.
Sun Life says the tools operate within governance, privacy and security controls while retaining human judgment and accountability in the advisor workflow.
The useful evidence is adoption inside a real advisory workflow rather than another AI pilot announcement. More than 11,000 client conversations and measurable administrative time savings show where AI governance for Canadian financial advisors is becoming operational: meeting records, follow-up communications and internal information retrieval. As these tools become routine, firms need controls that keep advisor responsibility intact while still capturing the productivity benefit.
Stripe agreed to acquire OpenRouter, an AI model gateway that routes and optimizes token usage across more than 400 models from over 80 providers.
OpenRouter evaluates requests based on factors including task complexity, price, speed and reliability and is used by companies including NVIDIA, Zoom and Lovable.
Stripe says the acquisition will combine model-routing optimization with infrastructure it already provides for payments, billing and AI token economics.
Stripe is extending beyond the financial transaction layer into the infrastructure that determines which AI model handles a request and at what cost. That builds on Stripe's expanding infrastructure stack across payments, billing and financial operations. OpenRouter gives Stripe a position in both revenue collection and one of the largest variable costs facing AI companies: model and compute usage.
AWS made Amazon Bedrock AgentCore payments generally available, allowing AI agents to discover, access and pay for paid APIs, MCP services and content in production environments.
The service integrates with Coinbase and Stripe Privy wallets, supports x402 and the Machine Payment Protocol and can enforce configurable spending limits at the infrastructure layer.
AgentCore provides payment-session budgets, expiry controls, audit trails and transaction observability intended to limit and monitor autonomous agent spending.
Giving an AI agent permission to transact creates a different control problem from giving it permission to retrieve information or call software tools. AgentCore places deterministic spending limits and transaction records around an otherwise non-deterministic agent, separating the agent's decision process from the infrastructure that authorizes payment. That control layer is becoming central to whether autonomous financial activity can be deployed at production scale.
Kraken launched access to more than 7,000 U.S. listed stocks for eligible customers across the EEA under its MiFID II authorization.
Traditional shares can now sit alongside more than 600 crypto assets and 700+ xStocks inside Kraken's regulated multi asset environment, without customers moving capital between separate platforms.
The conventional stocks and xStocks remain legally different products. The stock service is provided through Payward Europe Digital Solutions (CY) Limited, while xStocks are separately issued tokenized products backed by underlying shares.
Kraken is extending a crypto distribution platform into conventional brokerage while keeping tokenized equities available beside traditional shares. That gives customers two different ownership and market-access structures inside one interface and puts more competitive pressure on brokers that still separate securities, crypto and tokenized products across different accounts.
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission proposed removing the requirement that swap execution facilities maintain an order book for transactions classified as permitted transactions.
The proposal would allow SEFs greater flexibility in deciding which execution methods they make available for swaps that are not subject to the mandatory trade-execution requirement.
The change would preserve the separate execution framework for required transactions while reducing a prescriptive platform requirement for the permitted category.
The proposal addresses how much trading functionality regulators should require when a swap does not have to trade through a prescribed execution method in the first place. Removing the order-book requirement could lower operating complexity for SEFs and give participants more choice in how less standardized or less liquid transactions are executed. The regulatory tradeoff is whether greater flexibility improves market efficiency without weakening transparency or competitive access.
Natural raised a credit facility of up to US$100 million from Upper90, adding to more than US$40 million in equity financing.
The facility gives Natural additional capital capacity for its payment and credit products as payment volume and deployed credit increase.
Natural identifies itself as a financial technology company. Wallet Account and banking services are provided by Column N.A., Member FDIC.
Natural says payment infrastructure at scale requires capital because funds can be advanced before cash settles. The Upper90 facility adds dedicated financing capacity to the software and payment products Natural is building for AI agents. It complements AI agent spending controls emerging elsewhere in the stack, where transaction limits, authorization records and auditability govern automated payments.
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission requested public input on potential derivatives markets tied to computing capacity used by artificial intelligence and other high-performance workloads.
The review covers issues including market liquidity, price formation, manipulation, customer protection and how compute derivatives could be structured and traded.
The CFTC is also examining perpetual or other futures-style products that could allow companies and investors to manage exposure to changing compute costs.
Compute is starting to behave like a financial input rather than only a technology expense. Secondary markets are already emerging around scarce AI capacity, with market participants looking for better price discovery, liquidity and ways to manage infrastructure cost risk. Derivatives would take that development further by allowing firms to hedge future compute costs and availability, bringing market structure, manipulation and customer-protection questions directly into AI infrastructure.
ESMA opened consultation on technical standards for annual reporting by EU clearing members and clients on activity conducted through recognised third country central counterparties under EMIR Article 7d.
The proposed reporting includes instrument types, average annual cleared values by EU currency and asset class, margins, default-fund contributions and the largest payment obligation.
ESMA is trying to reuse information already available through existing EU reporting regimes and limit duplicate requirements, with comments due October 12, 2026.
The consultation exposes a tension inside post trade regulation: supervisors want better visibility into EU dependence on non-EU clearing infrastructure, but much of the relevant transaction information is already reported elsewhere. ESMA's design work therefore centres on identifying genuine data gaps rather than creating another parallel reporting system. The final technical standards will determine how much additional operational burden clearing firms face for that added visibility.
IFSCA opened a consultation on specifying operating leases and hybrid operating and financial leases of GPUs and connected data-centre equipment as a financial product.
The proposed scope includes accelerated processors, AI servers, storage, networking, interconnect and power equipment needed to operate integrated computing clusters.
Financial institutions in GIFT IFSC could hold the equipment directly or use lease-in, lease-out arrangements. The proposal remains subject to consultation, subsequent notification and inclusion in the IFSC leasing framework.
A regulated leasing route would let AI operators finance compute capacity over time while giving GIFT IFSC a position in the capital layer beneath AI deployment. The proposal addresses the AI infrastructure costs that are becoming a material constraint on production use.
Alpaca Derivatives LLC has registered with the CFTC as a futures commission merchant and is an NFA member as Alpaca prepares to add prediction markets to its infrastructure platform.
The company plans to let fintechs and financial platforms embed access to event contracts alongside other investment products through Alpaca infrastructure.
Alpaca Derivatives has not yet begun regulated FCM business operations, so the registration establishes the regulatory structure for a future launch rather than live customer access today.
Prediction markets are moving closer to the brokerage infrastructure already used to distribute financial products through fintech apps. That strengthens the innovation opportunity in regulated event contract infrastructure, where distribution, compliance, market integrity and settlement become as important as the contracts themselves. Alpaca's next proof point is whether partners actually embed the product once regulated operations begin.
Blockchain.com was admitted to the Nigerian Securities and Exchange Commission's Accelerated Regulatory Incubation Programme after satisfying the programme's initial participation requirements.
The company is authorized to operate within ARIP's defined sandbox scope while remaining subject to testing, compliance obligations and regulatory conditions set by the SEC.
ARIP gives Blockchain.com a supervised route to develop its Nigerian presence while the SEC evaluates digital asset business models, investor safeguards and anti money laundering controls.
The significance is regulated market access rather than a full crypto licence. Nigeria is using supervised incubation to bring international digital asset firms inside its regulatory perimeter while retaining control over permitted activities and operating conditions. For Blockchain.com, that creates a formal route into a large African digital finance market without treating sandbox admission as unrestricted authorization.
China added eight commercial banks to the e-CNY operating network, increasing the number of participating operators from 22 to 30.
The newly added banks will begin providing digital yuan services after completing the required operational and technical preparations.
The expansion follows an earlier 2026 increase from 10 to 22 operators, extending the institutional distribution network behind China's central bank digital currency.
Adding more operating banks widens the distribution infrastructure behind the e-CNY without proving that customer adoption or transaction volumes have increased. The expansion builds on China's earlier digital yuan bank expansion and shows the operating network continuing to grow through established financial institutions rather than remaining concentrated among the original participants.
Liquid Group and PagBrasil launched Phase 1 of the RoamQR and Pix connection, allowing users of participating Asian banking apps and digital wallets to pay participating Brazilian merchants by scanning existing Pix QR codes.
The companies completed commercial agreements, technical integration, certification and operational readiness after announcing the partnership in November 2025, making Brazil RoamQR's first live payment corridor in Latin America.
A planned second phase would allow Brazilian Pix users to make QR payments in Singapore and other RoamQR markets, subject to implementation readiness and regulatory approvals.
RoamQR connects international users to Pix without requiring Brazilian merchants to install new hardware or replace the QR infrastructure they already use. Participating wallets also avoid building separate bilateral integrations for each market. That is the interoperability problem highlighted in the cross border payments benchmark: strong domestic rails create more value when networks can connect them across borders without rebuilding the customer and merchant experience.
Bank of China (Hong Kong) and Ant International formed a strategic partnership covering cross-border payments, real-time corporate liquidity management, AI-enabled treasury services and financial services for SMEs.
BOCHK will provide accounts and settlement banking services supporting Alipay+ payments across Southeast Asia, where the Alipay+ ecosystem spans more than 50 mobile payment partners covering over 2 billion user accounts.
Ant International's Bettr and BOCHK will explore blockchain and tokenization for real-time cash-flow and investment solutions, while WorldFirst will work with the bank on cross-border fund-management services for SMEs.
The partnership joins several financial layers that are often handled separately: consumer payment settlement, corporate liquidity, foreign exchange, tokenized treasury infrastructure and SME cross-border banking. It also fits Hong Kong's wider push toward tokenized financial infrastructure, where banks are combining regulated balance-sheet access with digital settlement and asset infrastructure rather than treating tokenization as a standalone product experiment.
TerraPay and Deutsche Bank announced an expanded relationship connecting TerraPay's cross-border payment infrastructure with Deutsche Bank's correspondent banking capabilities.
The arrangement gives TerraPay access to Deutsche Bank payment and foreign exchange services to support settlement across its international payment network.
The partnership connects fintech distribution with bank settlement infrastructure as TerraPay continues to provide cross-border payments into bank accounts and mobile wallets across multiple markets.
Cross-border payment platforms can simplify the customer-facing experience, but settlement still depends heavily on regulated banking infrastructure, currency access and correspondent relationships underneath the API. Those dependencies are a central reason faster cross-border payments remain operationally difficult. Deutsche Bank gives TerraPay another institutional layer for moving and settling funds across currencies and jurisdictions, where corridor coverage, liquidity and local network access still determine performance.
Fiserv and Thunes are connecting Fiserv's merchant ecosystem to international payouts through a single integration for ecommerce platforms, marketplaces and other business customers.
Thunes says its Direct Global Network reaches 12 billion bank accounts and mobile wallets across more than 140 countries and 90 currencies.
The service will support payments to employees, suppliers and other recipients by combining Fiserv's merchant distribution with Thunes' cross border payout infrastructure.
Cross border payment competition is increasingly about how much complexity a platform can remove for the business initiating the payment. A single integration into global payout infrastructure can reduce the need to manage separate banking, wallet and local payment connections market by market. Fiserv now gives Thunes a much larger distribution channel into platforms and marketplaces that already manage business payment flows.
Afriex disclosed details of a Global Innovations Bank partnership that became effective in Q2 2026 and supports sponsor banking and settlement for its cross-border payments infrastructure.
The arrangement provides Global USD Account access, expanded banking and regulatory coverage and faster settlement across supported corridors, with additional treasury and foreign exchange capabilities planned.
Afriex says its infrastructure processes more than US$600 million annually across more than 35 countries for remittance providers, payroll companies, ecommerce businesses, fintechs, banks and enterprises.
The Aug. 17 trigger is the public disclosure of the operating relationship, not the date the partnership became effective. The substance sits underneath Afriex's payment API: sponsor banking, settlement access and regulatory coverage determine how reliably the platform can connect local payment rails with international money movement. For cross-border fintechs, those banking relationships remain core infrastructure even when customers experience the service through a single API.
Munich Re agreed to acquire U.S. cyber-insurtech At-Bay at an enterprise value of US$575 million, with closing expected in the first quarter of 2027 subject to regulatory approvals and other customary conditions.
At-Bay had US$278 million in gross written premiums at the end of 2025, employs approximately 280 people and provides insurance and security services to close to 40,000 U.S. businesses.
The business will sit under Hartford Steam Boiler within Munich Re Specialty, combining cyber underwriting with continuous monitoring, risk mitigation and security technology.
The acquisition puts insurance capacity, underwriting data and active cyber defence inside the same operating structure. At-Bay already monitors insured risk throughout the policy lifecycle, giving Munich Re a platform that can influence both loss prevention and pricing rather than relying only on claims experience after an incident. That integration could become more important as cyber insurers compete on the quality of the security controls wrapped around coverage.
Boost launched Boost SME, a fully digital business banking platform combining accounts, payment acceptance and financing for Malaysian small businesses.
Businesses can open an account in as little as five minutes and receive same-day DuitNow QR settlements, including on weekends and Malaysian public holidays.
Financing includes Merchant Cash Advance and Boost Bank Biz Loans of up to RM300,000, with approvals advertised as fast as 10 minutes and disbursement as fast as 24 hours after acceptance.
Boost is putting banking, merchant payments and credit inside one operating interface for small businesses rather than distributing them as separate products. Same-day settlement can feed directly into cash management while transaction history can sit closer to financing decisions. For SMEs, the value depends on whether that integration reduces the time between making a sale, receiving usable funds and obtaining working capital when it is needed.
Capco surveyed 1,000 Canadian consumers and found 36% had experienced an attempted payment fraud during the previous two years.
Security was identified as an important factor when choosing a financial institution by 60% of respondents, while advanced fraud protection was selected by 46%.
Only 33% were very confident their primary financial institution would protect them from payment fraud, while 52% said their institution had not informed them about deepfake payment threats or they could not recall receiving that guidance.
Canada's move toward faster payments compresses the time available to detect scams before money leaves an account. The survey shows that consumers already put security ahead of speed and convenience, while confidence in fraud protection remains uneven. As Real Time Rail testing and access advance, banks and payment providers will need fraud controls that work across identity, accounts and transaction channels rather than relying mainly on intervention after a suspicious payment has been completed.
The Securities and Futures Commission issued controls for licensed corporations, virtual-asset service providers and associated entities using simplified electronic Direct Debit Authorisation to receive client deposits.
When a payer bank does not confirm an authorization directly with the account owner, the licensed firm initiating the arrangement bears primary responsibility for obtaining proper authorization and may face related indemnity claims.
Firms should verify account ownership, consider small-value verification transfers, apply transaction limits or withholding periods, use stronger authentication where appropriate and decline instructions when required checks cannot be completed.
Specified warning signs include rapid or unusually large deposits, activity inconsistent with a client’s profile, new wallet addresses added around an eDDA setup and deposits quickly converted into virtual assets for withdrawal.
The circular connects Faster Payment System deposits directly to trading-account and virtual-asset controls. Efficient funding depends on whether firms can verify ownership, stop suspicious instructions and manage the liability attached to simplified authorization.
AUSTRAC's Fintel Alliance analysed data from 10 major Australian banks and identified potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in suspected fraudulent mortgage loans, with much of the activity linked to properties in Sydney.
Operation Claw found recurring use of inflated incomes, misrepresented employment, fabricated business activity and false or misleading documents across multiple lenders.
Participating banks have used the intelligence to investigate potentially fraudulent loans, strengthen controls and make referrals, while AUSTRAC has shared relevant names and entities with regulatory and law-enforcement agencies.
The investigation shows why mortgage fraud controls cannot rely only on what one lender can see inside its own book. Repeated brokers, accountants, law firms, documents and funding patterns became more visible when information from multiple banks was analysed together. For lenders, that strengthens the case for shared intelligence and earlier detection before questionable loans are approved and funds become harder to recover.
SafePal disclosed unauthorized access to customer order information affecting approximately 39,798 people who placed orders between March 2, 2025 and April 11, 2026.
The exposed data included names, email addresses, shipping addresses, phone numbers and purchase details. SafePal says seed phrases, private keys, wallet passwords, payment-card data and access to customer funds were not compromised.
SafePal fixed the order-tracking authorization flaw, shortened relevant data retention to 90 days and says it has taken down more than 30 fraudulent websites and phishing links connected with scam activity.
Hardware wallet security now extends beyond protecting private keys. Order records can identify where crypto holders live and what they purchased, creating targeted phishing, impersonation and physical-security risks even when the wallet itself remains secure. That adds a customer-data layer to the self custody security risks already exposed by device and firmware failures.
APRA published its 2026–27 Corporate Plan, setting priorities for the next four years and a policy and supervision agenda covering the next 12 to 18 months.
Supervision will examine resilience to AI-enabled cyber threats, quantum-computing risk and concentrated reliance on common technology platforms and material service providers.
APRA also plans to develop a prudential framework for large stored-value facility providers and work with ASIC on implementation guidance, subject to the Australian government completing the relevant reforms.
APRA’s earlier focus on AI risk governance now extends to shared technology dependencies and stored-value infrastructure. Banks, fintech vendors and wallet providers should expect closer scrutiny of resilience, provider concentration and accountability across outsourced systems.
Weekly Close
Like the several past months, this week’s Whisperer shows financial infrastructure becoming more integrated, more programmable and more regulated at the same time. The edge is going to firms that can combine distribution, trusted controls and ownership of the infrastructure underneath payments, AI, digital assets and capital markets without adding friction faster than they add capability.
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August 20, 2026 | NCFA Resource | Payments And Money Movement, Banking And Credit, Financial Inclusion
Payment Habits, Contactless Use And Cash Demand
On August 20, 2026, the Bank of Canada published its 2025 Methods-of-Payment Survey, based on responses from 4,964 Canadians and payment diary data from 2,185 participants. The report measures cash holdings, card use, mobile payments, Interac e-Transfer, payment costs, merchant acceptance and how consumers rate different ways to pay.
For payments firms, banks, fintechs and policy teams, the survey provides a current national benchmark for consumer behaviour. Credit cards remain the dominant payment method, contactless now accounts for most in-person purchases, mobile devices are taking a larger share of card taps, and cash remains widely held even though its transaction share fell in 2025.
What It Does In Practice
Credit cards accounted for 48% of purchase volume and 58% of purchase value in 2025. Debit represented 25% of volume and 24% of value, while cash accounted for 18% of point of sale transaction volume and 10% of value. Cash had represented 21% of volume and 11% of value in 2024, so the latest survey records a decline after several years of relative stability.
Contactless payments now dominate in person. In 2025, 63% of in-person payments were contactless, representing 61% of in-person purchase value. Most taps still used physical cards, but mobile devices accounted for one quarter of contactless credit transactions and 15% of contactless debit transactions.
The mobile figures are more useful than in previous surveys because the Bank changed its 2025 payment diary. Respondents who reported tapping a card were asked whether they used the physical card or a version stored on a mobile device. That difference helps separate adoption of mobile wallets from adoption of the underlying payment rail. A credit card stored in a phone remains a credit card transaction, but the interface through which the customer pays has changed.
The revised survey also suggests previous estimates understated mobile use. Over the previous year, 41% of Canadians reported using mobile payments, while just over half used Interac e-Transfer. About one quarter used a digital wallet app and 19% used a bank account app. Those adoption figures should not be read as transaction shares. Interac e-Transfer, for example, appears less often in the three day purchase diary because consumers frequently use it for expenses such as rent and home services that the diary does not capture.
The findings provide a useful consumer benchmark beside Canada’s financial infrastructure changes. Expanded Payments Canada membership, the Real-Time Rail, payment service provider oversight and consumer-driven banking are changing how firms can access and build on payment infrastructure. The Bank’s survey shows the payment habits those services will encounter as they reach consumers.
Cash presents a more mixed picture. About 76% of Canadians had cash on hand when surveyed, with an average of $141 and a median of $70 among people carrying it. Four out of five Canadians said they had no plans to stop using cash, while only 12% described themselves as cashless. At the same time, cash transaction share and average cash holdings both fell in 2025.
The Bank does not treat one year of weaker cash use as proof of a lasting decline. More observations are needed to separate a durable change from normal survey variation or a temporary result. Access also remains relevant: 68% of Canadians described access to an ABM as easy or very easy, compared with 61% for a bank branch.
Who Gets Value
Payment providers and fintech product teams can use the survey to test assumptions about where Canadian payment behaviour is concentrated. Credit and debit cards still account for most everyday purchases, contactless has become the normal in-person card experience, and mobile wallets are becoming a more important way of presenting those same card credentials.
Banks and financial institutions can use the findings to compare physical and digital access. Consumers are using mobile payment tools more often, but most still keep cash and report that access to ABMs and branches remains important. That combination is relevant when firms make decisions about digital channels, cash services, card products and customer support.
Investors and market researchers get a national reference point for assessing product adoption claims. The report separates annual use, recent use and actual transaction diary data, which helps distinguish a service that many people have tried from one that captures a large share of purchases.
Policy teams can read the findings alongside Canada’s consumer-driven banking rules. The survey does not measure open banking use, but it establishes how Canadians currently pay before regulated data sharing and future payment initiation services reach wider adoption.
For financial inclusion work, the cash findings are especially useful. Digital adoption does not mean all consumers have stopped using physical money. Most Canadians still keep cash, most do not plan to abandon it, and access to withdrawal infrastructure continues to affect how practical cash remains.
Strengths And Limits
The survey combines two useful forms of evidence. The questionnaire captures payment ownership, cash holdings, recent use, costs and consumer perceptions, while the three day diary records purchases and withdrawals closer to when they occur. In 2025, 4,964 people completed the questionnaire and 2,185 submitted at least one day of diary data.
Its history also adds value. The Bank began the Methods-of-Payment survey in 2009 and has run annual surveys since 2021, giving readers a basis for comparing the latest results with earlier payment behaviour. That longer record is why the 2025 decline in cash should be watched rather than immediately treated as a permanent change.
The methodology has limits. The questionnaire uses quota sampling by age, gender and region, then calibrates the samples to Canadian demographic characteristics. The diary covers only three days, and not every questionnaire respondent completes it, so less frequent payments can appear more clearly in recall questions than in the transaction diary.
The new mobile measurement also affects comparisons with earlier years. Separating physical card taps from cards stored on mobile devices improves the 2025 data, but some earlier mobile figures were measured differently and should not be compared mechanically.
NCFA’s Canadian payments market coverage puts the Bank’s consumer survey beside a much larger benchmark. Payments Canada recorded 22.5 billion retail payment transactions worth $12.2 trillion in 2024. The two datasets answer different questions. The Bank of Canada focuses on how consumers hold, choose and use payment methods, while Payments Canada measures transaction volumes, values and market activity across the payment system.
The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, artificial intelligence, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: [www.ncfacanada.org](http://www.ncfacanada.org)
August 19, 2026 | NCFA Resource | Cybersecurity And Fraud, Risk Compliance And Regtech, Capital Markets And Market Infrastructure
12 Controls For Cyber Risk, Vendors, Access And Recovery
In August 2026, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority published Cybersecurity Effective Practices, a 12-part framework for FINRA member firms reviewing cybersecurity programs, controls and operating procedures. A firm can use the resource as a structured checklist for who owns cybersecurity, which systems and vendors create risk, who can access sensitive data, how threats are detected, and whether the business can recover when systems fail. FINRA designed the practices to scale with firm size, business model, technology complexity and risk profile.
What It Does In Practice
FINRA organizes the resource around 12 areas:
governance
risk management
third party risk management
asset management
access control and identity management
data protection
security awareness and training
vulnerability and patch management
security monitoring
threat intelligence and information sharing
incident response and reporting
resilience and recovery
The framework starts with accountability and risk ownership. FINRA recommends a designated cybersecurity lead, regular reporting to senior decision makers, documented policies and periodic reviews, while also making cyber risk part of decisions about new technology, systems and operating changes. From there, firms are expected to identify the information, systems and business functions they depend on, assess threats such as ransomware, insider activity and vendor exposure, test important systems for weaknesses and revisit those risks when technology or operations change.
Third party risk receives detailed treatment. FINRA treats vendors with access to customer information or critical systems as part of the firm’s security perimeter. Firms should know which vendors have access, understand important fourth party relationships and identify which providers support critical operations. Contracts can address audit rights, data handling, breach notification and visibility into subcontractors, while ongoing oversight should include access monitoring and a documented process for removing access and handling customer information when a relationship ends.
That concern extends beyond US broker dealers. Weak access control governance can expose sensitive information when a partner or service provider retains permissions that are unnecessary or poorly monitored. FINRA’s guidance connects vendor governance with the practical question of who can access systems and data, for how long, and under what controls.
Asset management and access control fit naturally together. FINRA recommends keeping a current inventory of hardware, software, cloud services and data flows, assigning owners to important assets and identifying systems that no longer receive security updates. Once firms know what they have, they can control who gets access through unique credentials, role based permissions, multifactor authentication, periodic entitlement reviews, segregation of duties and least privilege. Access should also be changed or removed promptly when employees change roles or leave.
Data protection, training and patching cover another part of the operating picture. Firms are encouraged to classify sensitive data, encrypt it at rest and in transit where feasible, control retention and protect backups, including with immutable or air gapped storage. FINRA also recommends ongoing employee training, role specific instruction for staff with sensitive access and phishing simulations backed by records of participation. Vulnerability management should include regular scanning, risk based patch priorities and verification that remediation work was completed rather than assumed.
Who Gets Value
The primary users are FINRA member broker dealers, including compliance teams, cybersecurity leaders, technology teams, operations executives and senior management. Smaller firms can use the 12 areas to identify where basic controls are missing without trying to copy the cybersecurity program of a much larger institution, while larger firms can use the same structure to review whether responsibilities, documentation and technical controls are working together.
Technology providers, managed security firms, consultants and RegTech companies serving broker dealers can also use the resource to understand what clients may expect around access, logging, vendor controls, data handling, patching, incident response and recovery. Boards and senior executives can use it as a governance checklist because FINRA makes cybersecurity ownership, management reporting, resource decisions and documented risk acceptance part of the program rather than leaving cyber risk entirely with the technology team.
Strengths And Limits
The main strength is that FINRA connects governance directly to operating controls. A firm can follow the framework from senior accountability through asset inventories, identity controls, encryption, training, monitoring and recovery testing, which makes the document more useful than a high level cyber policy statement.
Third party risk is also handled with more depth than a basic checklist. Firms are expected to understand vendor dependencies, monitor privileged access, address fourth parties and plan how systems and data will be handled when a provider relationship ends. Security monitoring extends that discipline to unusual access, suspicious data transfers, system changes and privileged accounts, with logs retained long enough to support operations, investigations, forensic work and applicable recordkeeping requirements.
The framework also includes threat intelligence, incident response and recovery. FINRA recommends using relevant threat feeds, updating defenses as attack methods change and participating in trusted information sharing networks. Incident response focuses on how a firm detects, escalates and contains an event, while recovery planning deals with how critical systems and data return to service afterward. Tested backups, tabletop exercises, offline procedures and defined Recovery Point Objectives and Recovery Time Objectives all help firms decide how much data loss and downtime different systems can tolerate.
The main limitation is jurisdiction. FINRA developed the resource for US member firms and connects several practices to US requirements, including SEC Regulations S-P and S-ID, FINRA Rules 3110 and 4370, and Exchange Act recordkeeping rules. The document also doesn't create new legal or regulatory requirements or reinterpret existing ones. For Canadian financial technology and service firms, its best use is as a practical comparison and control review, not as a statement of Canadian regulatory obligations.
The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, artificial intelligence, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: [www.ncfacanada.org](http://www.ncfacanada.org)
Aug 8, 2026 | NCFA Fintech Whisperer | Digital Banking And BaaS, Regulation And Policy, SME Finance And Business Banking, Digital Assets Blockchain And Tokenization, Payments Infrastructure And Money Movement, Capital Markets Infrastructure And Funding, Artificial Intelligence And Data, Wealthtech Investing And Trading, Embedded Finance, Risk Compliance And Regtech, Lending Consumer Credit And BNPL, Cybersecurity Fraud And Financial Crime
Gate, which Alpaca says serves more than 58 million users, launched access to more than 10,000 U.S. listed stocks and ETFs, eligible IPO allocations and tokenized stocks using Alpaca infrastructure.
Alpaca provides the brokerage infrastructure behind the offering and supports custody and settlement of the underlying shares associated with Gate's gStocks tokenized stock product.
One day earlier, Crypto.com launched Tokenized Stocks through Alpaca for a platform serving more than 150 million customers, offering economic exposure to 1,500 U.S. stocks and ETFs from US$1, with selected products available around the clock.
Crypto.com's products are derivative financial instruments that provide economic exposure rather than ownership of the underlying shares or associated shareholder rights.
Large crypto platforms are starting to look more like multi asset investment distributors, but the infrastructure underneath them is still regulated brokerage, custody and settlement. Alpaca has been building specifically for this role, which NCFA recently examined in its global brokerage platform expansion. The competitive question is who controls that regulated layer as crypto, traditional securities and tokenized products converge inside the same customer interface.
BlackRock Canada launched the iShares Equity + Bitcoin ETF Portfolio, or IBQT, on the Toronto Stock Exchange with a strategic allocation of approximately 97% global equities and 3% bitcoin.
The fund carries a 0.22% management fee and packages Canadian, U.S., international and emerging market equities with bitcoin exposure inside one portfolio.
IBQT currently gets its bitcoin exposure through BlackRock’s Canadian IBIT fund, extending that product from a standalone bitcoin investment into a component of a diversified portfolio.
IBQT changes where the crypto allocation decision happens. Investors choosing the fund are buying a diversified equity portfolio with bitcoin already assigned a modest strategic weight, rather than adding crypto separately. That puts bitcoin closer to conventional portfolio construction and gives Canadian advisers and investors a simple way to combine traditional markets and digital assets in one listed product.
Flywire expanded its Trustly partnership into Canada and the United States, letting payers authorize large domestic and cross border payments directly from their bank accounts.
In Canada, the payment itself runs through Pre Authorized Debit. Trustly adds bank authentication and account connectivity around that existing rail rather than using Canada’s future regulated payment initiation framework.
The service removes manual account entry during checkout and adds payment verification and risk controls around higher value bank transfers.
Pay by Bank is reaching Canadian customers before regulated payment initiation does. Foreign providers are improving the experience around an existing Canadian bank rail instead of waiting for new infrastructure. That makes the commercial timing important for Canada’s open banking opportunity: future regulated access will enter a market where some of the customer experience is already being built.
Toronto based Dream Payments launched Dream Payouts for eligible U.S. businesses in collaboration with J.P. Morgan Payments, supporting payments to suppliers, partners and individuals.
Eligible payments can arrive through the RTP network in under 30 seconds, including nights, weekends and holidays, with ACH and wire available when instant delivery is unavailable or not selected.
Software platforms can embed payout capabilities, while Dream provides recipient onboarding, identity checks, banking verification, approval controls and transaction tracking from initiation through settlement.
Dream says the infrastructure can support software and AI agents that initiate, approve and reconcile payments within defined business controls.
Dream is taking infrastructure built by a Canadian fintech into U.S. business payment workflows where the payment can start inside the software that created the obligation. That also gives agent payment infrastructure a more concrete operating model: software can participate in the workflow, but identity, authority, approval and settlement controls still determine whether money moves.
Francisco Partners agreed to acquire Moneris from RBC and BMO for approximately C$2.0 billion in cash, with each bank receiving half of the proceeds. The transaction remains subject to regulatory approvals and other closing conditions.
RBC and BMO will keep exclusive referral relationships with Moneris even as ownership of the payments company transfers to Francisco Partners.
Moneris says it has nearly 2,000 employees in Canada and will retain its Canadian headquarters and technology infrastructure after the transaction closes.
Last year’s Moneris sale discussion has become a signed change of control. RBC and BMO are giving up ownership while preserving customer distribution, leaving Francisco Partners to decide how aggressively Moneris invests across merchant acquiring, commerce software and payments technology. The separation between infrastructure ownership and bank distribution is the more consequential part of the deal.
CIMPA and CDS will begin the first stage of Canada's fail fee framework for Government of Canada bond and T-bill transactions on September 8, 2026.
The trial will run for at least 18 months. Settlement fails and indicative fees will be calculated, statistics will be published and CDS participants will receive reports and indicative invoices.
No fail fees will be charged or paid during this first stage. The Canadian Fixed-Income Forum will decide whether payments are activated later.
Canada is putting a settlement discipline framework into live measurement before imposing a financial penalty. That gives dealers, custodians and market infrastructure providers time to see where fails occur, what the operational burden looks like and whether the fee design changes settlement behaviour. The evidence from the trial will determine whether a reporting framework eventually becomes an economic incentive.
CIMPA, TMX Group and Clearstream have started repo trading using a standardized Government of Canada General Collateral basket on the Canadian Collateral Management Service.
CCMS automates repo collateral management and supports unlimited real time collateral substitution, giving participants another way to manage liquidity and collateral throughout a transaction.
The first GoC basket is expected to be followed by standardized baskets covering provincial securities, Canada Mortgage Bonds, NHA mortgage backed securities, public sector securities and corporate collateral.
Canada's repo market now has a standardized collateral workflow running on infrastructure that the Bank of Canada also plans to use for its domestic repo operations. Wider adoption would make collateral easier to allocate and substitute across financing activity while reducing manual processing. The next evidence is usage: how much repo activity migrates onto CCMS and whether the additional baskets deepen participation beyond Government of Canada securities.
PointsKash announced an expanded strategic capital commitment of up to US$100 million from Hawk Capital Advisors to support commercialization and national deployment of its financial services platform.
The first phase provides for up to US$35 million through October 30, 2026 for priorities including refurbishment and deployment of approximately 2,100 company owned KashPoint kiosks, technology integration, merchant activation, PK Pay development and working capital.
A second phase could provide up to another US$65 million between February and April 2027, subject to operating and deployment milestones, customary closing conditions and financing availability.
The financing connects capital directly to deployment of a physical and digital financial services network rather than funding an undefined expansion plan. PointsKash acquired more than 2,100 cryptocurrency kiosks earlier in August and now has a staged capital structure intended to refurbish and redeploy that hardware while building payments, merchant and mobile services around it. The conditional structure also keeps a clear line between near term funding and the larger amount that depends on execution.
CIRO now requires a Participant or Access Person to have a reasonable expectation that a short sale can settle on the intended settlement date before entering the order.
The rule adds a positive control before execution instead of relying only on action after a trade fails to settle.
CIRO provides defined exceptions, including certain sales involving securities a person is deemed to own, subject to prescribed delivery conditions.
The rule changes where settlement risk has to be dealt with. Firms must support the expectation of settlement before a short sale reaches the market, putting more responsibility on trading controls, securities availability and supervision. Difficult to borrow securities and repeated settlement failures will show how demanding the requirement becomes in practice.
Reserve Bank of India Governor Sanjay Malhotra told banks to maintain inventories of material AI systems and establish governance that assigns clear responsibility for their use and risks.
He called for contracts with AI providers to preserve audit, explanation and exit rights, while material systems should be stress tested and tested against adversarial behaviour before deployment and periodically afterward.
Banks should retain meaningful human oversight where an AI error could materially harm a customer or financial stability, including lending, fraud and other consequential decisions.
RBI is pushing AI governance into the same operating disciplines banks already use for material risk. That aligns with Canadian work on regulated AI, where model oversight, vendor access, fallback plans and proof of control are becoming practical requirements. The advantage will come from deploying useful AI while being able to show who owns the risk and how the system is controlled.
Brazil’s central bank is assessing bilateral connections between Pix and foreign instant-payment systems, as well as participation in multilateral payment hubs, to support lower-cost and faster cross-border transfers.
The work goes beyond earlier discussion of possible international expansion. Banco Central do Brasil had already placed Pix Internacional on its 2027+ development agenda in March, and the August update points to more concrete interoperability options.
Pix processed nearly 80 billion transactions worth more than R$35 trillion in 2025, giving any international connection potential scale well beyond a niche cross-border payment product.
Pix is starting to test whether a national instant-payment rail can connect directly into foreign payment infrastructure rather than relying only on traditional correspondent channels. NCFA’s cross border payments benchmark shows why that distinction matters: strong domestic rails don’t automatically solve international cost, speed or interoperability. The practical questions are which systems Brazil connects to first, how FX, compliance and settlement are handled across jurisdictions, and whether this becomes a repeatable model for other domestic real time rails.
The OCC granted preliminary conditional approval for World Liberty Trust Company, National Association, the proposed national trust bank of Trump family backed World Liberty Financial.
The approved business plan covers USD1 issuance and redemption, maintenance of USD1 reserve assets, fiduciary digital asset custody and limited conversion services for custody customers.
The approval is not authority to begin operations. The proposed bank is limited to trust company activities, does not plan to become an FDIC insured depository institution and must satisfy remaining OCC conditions before commencing business.
USD1 could move from a stablecoin structure supported by external service providers into a federally supervised trust bank that combines issuance, redemption, reserves and custody. That would bring more of the operating stack behind a payment stablecoin inside one regulated entity, while concentrating responsibility for reserve management, safeguarding and compliance.
Deribit FZE received a Broker Dealer Licence from Dubai's Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority, expanding the permissions behind its existing regulated spot trading operation.
Spot buy, sell and trade orders placed on Deribit can now be routed to Coinbase Exchange for execution, giving clients access to deeper liquidity and hundreds of additional assets.
The upgraded spot service is rolling out to retail, qualified and institutional investors. Assets acquired through it can also be used as collateral for Deribit derivatives trading, subject to regulatory approval.
The Coinbase acquisition is moving from ownership into shared market infrastructure. Deribit can keep its derivatives interface while drawing on Coinbase's spot liquidity and execution stack, extending the Deribit acquisition strategy into day to day trading. That brings spot execution, collateral and derivatives closer together inside one regulated operating structure.
PM MTF Ltd received CySEC authorization under MiCA for crypto asset services alongside its existing regulated European trading venue.
The authorized activities include operating a crypto asset trading platform, custody and administration, execution of orders, reception and transmission of orders, and crypto asset transfers.
The authorization provides a regulated route for Perpetual Markets to extend crypto services across the EEA, including infrastructure that can support institutional and white label distribution.
The significance is the combination of existing regulated market infrastructure with newly authorized crypto services. Rather than building a separate crypto venue, Perpetual Markets can extend an established MTF operating model into digital assets, giving brokers and institutions another route to offer crypto products under a European regulatory framework. The announcement authorizes expansion, but does not establish that every permitted crypto service is already live at scale.
Hong Kong licensed issuer Anchorpoint began phase one of HKD At Par, or HKDAP, through Beta Access for institutional distributors and professional investors.
Authorized distributors can provide conversion between HKDAP and fiat currency for institutions, corporate users and professional investors while integrating the stablecoin into commercial and financial applications.
Anchorpoint is initially targeting cross border payments and settlement and distribution of tokenized real world assets. Broader retail access could begin as early as the end of 2026, depending on market conditions.
Hong Kong's stablecoin regime has crossed from licensing into controlled distribution and commercial use. That builds on the tokenized finance strategy NCFA has been tracking through Standard Chartered and Hong Kong's regulators. HKDAP now has to prove that regulated tokenized money can attract repeat transaction flow across payments, asset settlement and institutional distribution rather than remain a licensed product with limited circulation.
Coinbase received Financial Services Permission from the Financial Services Regulatory Authority of ADGM to arrange investment deals and provide custody in support of tokenized securities.
Coinbase says securities issued through the structure will be backed by underlying shares, with verified token holders receiving shareholder rights including dividends and voting.
Transfers will be subject to ongoing sanctions screening, with wallet level freeze and seizure capabilities where required.
The important distinction is the legal and operating structure behind the token. Coinbase is combining regulated custody, underlying shares, investor rights and blockchain transferability rather than offering price exposure alone. That puts the model inside the infrastructure test NCFA is tracking for regulated tokenized assets: whether ownership rights, custody, compliance and transfer can work together at market scale.
Robinhood has begun rolling crypto trading out to eligible UK customers, adding more than 50 digital assets directly inside its main investing app alongside equities, ISAs, options and futures.
Crypto trading is provided through Bitstamp UK Ltd, bringing the regulated UK infrastructure Robinhood acquired with Bitstamp into Robinhood’s retail distribution channel. Robinhood completed the acquisition in June 2025 to accelerate its crypto expansion outside the U.S.
The rollout is a material follow-on to Robinhood’s July 1 announcement, when the company said UK crypto trading was coming soon but had not yet launched it. Robinhood’s own disclosure at the time still said its UK entity did not offer crypto trading or custody.
The launch also adds Cortex Digests for Crypto, using generative AI to combine news, market data, technical indicators and Robinhood information into asset-level market summaries.
Bitstamp is becoming more than an acquired exchange for Robinhood. Its UK crypto infrastructure now lets Robinhood add digital assets to the same interface where customers already invest across traditional markets. The next test is whether that combination deepens customer activity and gives Robinhood a repeatable way to extend its wider investment platform into regulated crypto markets.
Revolut announced phased testing of EURR on Ethereum for eligible customers in Denmark, Poland and Portugal beginning in August.
EURR is a euro-pegged e-money token issued by Bridge Building S.A., a Stripe company regulated by Luxembourg’s CSSF as a MiCA crypto-asset service provider and electronic money institution.
Eligible customers can use EURR across supported crypto services, external wallets and blockchain networks. Revolut expects to add more markets later in 2026 and says stablecoins tied to other currencies are in development through separate regulatory processes.
Bridge provides the regulated issuance while Revolut distributes EURR through its customer app. NCFA tracked Bridge’s European authorizations in July. The immediate evidence is limited to phased testing in three markets, and Revolut has not published EURR circulation, adoption or transaction-volume data.
Shakepay launched BLOC, a revolving line of credit that lets eligible Canadian customers borrow against bitcoin held with Shakepay without selling it.
Customers can borrow up to C$50,000 starting at 9.5% APR and track their balance, payments, collateral and loan to value ratio inside the Shakepay app.
BLOC is offered by Shakepay Credit Inc. under exemptive relief. If collateral values fall, borrowers may need to add bitcoin, repay part of the balance or face liquidation under the product terms.
Crypto backed lending is becoming part of the product stack offered by Canadian trading platforms. Shakepay is integrating the credit relationship directly into its own account experience, while embedded crypto lending at Netcoins uses APX to supply the lending operation behind the interface. The two models create different economics and different responsibility for underwriting, collateral controls and servicing.
Better and Coinbase opened their token-backed conforming mortgage to eligible Coinbase One members on August 12, according to an August 26 company announcement.
Better originates and services the mortgage, Coinbase powers the digital-asset component and the first lien is designed to meet Fannie Mae guidelines.
Approved borrowers can pledge crypto without selling it. Eligible Coinbase One members can receive a lender-funded closing credit equal to 1% of the mortgage value, capped at US$10,000.
The earlier waitlist represented more than US$260 million in projected loan volume. That figure indicates demand, not funded mortgages.
General availability converts the earlier token-backed mortgage launch into an open lending product. Funded volume, borrower performance, collateral custody and the treatment of pledged assets during delinquency will show whether the model can operate at conforming-mortgage scale.
Toronto based Mortgage Automator launched Draw Management, bringing construction budgets, draw schedules and approvals directly into the active loan file for private lenders.
The feature automatically flags budget variances and applies Project Health scoring so lenders can monitor construction progress and draw risk without relying on separate spreadsheets or disconnected workflows.
The launch follows Mortgage Automator's August 4 acquisition of Lendr, extending its expansion into construction and private lending infrastructure across North America.
Construction lending is operationally intensive because capital is released in stages and each draw depends on current budget, progress and compliance information. Moving those controls into the loan system can reduce reconciliation work and make exceptions visible earlier, while giving private lenders a more integrated way to manage construction credit as portfolios scale.
TD launched an in-app payroll direct-deposit switching experience that lets customers redirect payroll deposits to a TD account in about one minute with most employers.
The capability is powered by Atomic and sits inside the TD app, removing the need for customers to separately obtain banking details and update payroll information through their employer.
TD says it is the first Canadian financial institution to offer a fully integrated in-app payroll switching experience and has exclusive Canadian rights to Atomic’s capability through the end of 2026.
Opening a new bank account is easier than making it the primary account. Payroll switching reduces the work required to redirect recurring income and adds an operational layer to open banking and financial portability. Competition improves when customers can act on a better banking option, not only compare one. The next measure is whether easier switching translates into more primary-account relationships and deposits.
Revolut Bank S.A. received a full French banking licence following a joint assessment by France’s ACPR and the European Central Bank, with the decision formally adopted by the ECB Governing Council.
The new French bank will begin serving customers in France before progressively expanding across Germany, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain. Revolut Bank UAB in Lithuania remains the group’s other European banking hub.
Revolut says Western Europe now accounts for about 30 million customers. It has committed more than €1 billion to the region and is hiring more than 600 people across its Western European markets.
The licence turns Revolut’s banking expansion into a two-hub European structure with a new regulated entity serving its largest regional customer base. The execution test is how quickly customers and products migrate to the French bank, and whether local licences give Revolut more room to deepen lending, business banking and other regulated services across Western Europe.
The CFTC exercised emergency authority after Kalshi notified the Commission of a market emergency tied to litigation brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James.
The Commission ordered Kalshi to continue operating in accordance with the Commodity Exchange Act Core Principles. New York is seeking to stop Kalshi from offering event contracts nationwide and is pursuing more than US$36 billion in damages.
The CFTC says federal law requires a uniform national derivatives market and has challenged state efforts to apply gambling laws to federally regulated designated contract markets in several jurisdictions.
The dispute is becoming a direct test of who controls access to event contracts in the United States. The CFTC is treating Kalshi as national derivatives infrastructure while states continue to challenge parts of the market through gaming law. NCFA’s regulated event contract infrastructure brief tracks the same boundary between exchange regulation, market integrity and product access.
ClearScore, Modulr, Teya, Urban Jungle and Zilch became the first firms regulated solely by the FCA to join its Scale-up Unit.
The unit gives fast-growing regulated firms a dedicated regulatory contact for product launches, permission changes, policy developments and other issues that arise as they expand.
The FCA also published findings from a 15-firm high-growth pilot, including weaknesses where governance, board oversight, risk management and controls had not kept pace with business growth.
The FCA is making regulatory engagement part of the scale up process rather than waiting for rapid growth to create supervisory problems. NCFA’s closer look at the five firms shows how that support intersects with payments, credit, insurance and European expansion. For fintechs, the tradeoff is clearer: faster access to regulatory guidance comes with closer attention to whether governance, controls and customer protections are developing at the same rate as products, customers and market expansion.
Senate leadership filed cloture on the motion to proceed to H.R. 3633, the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, after the chamber left for its August recess without voting on the bill.
The Senate schedule says the cloture motion will ripen on September 15 at 2:15 p.m., creating a formal procedural route toward floor consideration when senators return.
The bill still faces a 60-vote threshold and unresolved negotiations, including bank concerns over stablecoin rewards and proposed ethics provisions.
The CLARITY Act has moved from an uncertain post-recess commitment to a scheduled Senate procedure. The September vote will test whether negotiators can assemble enough support to advance a federal market-structure framework and narrow the remaining disagreements over banking, stablecoins and digital-asset oversight.
Mercury launched Mercury Spend with budgets, expense policies and company cards managed through one spending system.
Businesses can issue dedicated cards to AI agents for approved transactions and monitor their spending separately from employee activity.
Budgets and expense policies provide the control layer around those cards, while Mercury can automatically categorize transactions and lock cards when required tasks remain overdue.
The important change is that an AI agent can now receive its own controlled payment credential rather than only prepare a transaction for someone else. That makes permission design part of the payment product. NCFA has already tracked how AI agents use card rails; Mercury brings the same question inside company spending, where budgets and policy controls define how much authority software actually receives.
SIDBI and MonetaGo confirmed that Secure Financing is live on SIDBI’s GST-Sahay invoice-based financing platform following a pilot and three months of production use.
The system validates invoices financed through India’s TReDS infrastructure and checks invoices across participating factoring platforms and lenders, including SBI Global Factors and India Factoring.
The production milestone follows the November 2025 SIDBI-MonetaGo partnership. The system is designed to identify duplicate financing and strengthen invoice validation before credit is advanced to MSMEs.
Invoice financing fraud controls are becoming shared lending infrastructure rather than checks performed inside one lender at a time. MonetaGo has been working on shared trade finance fraud controls for years; the SIDBI deployment brings that model into live MSME lending. The test is whether interoperable validation reduces duplicate financing and exceptions at scale while making cash flow credit faster and safer across multiple lenders and factoring platforms.
De Nederlandsche Bank granted Mews Financial Services B.V. an Electronic Money Institution licence, giving the hospitality software company regulated financial standing across the EEA.
Mews plans to bring payment services, financial workflows and hotel operating data into the same platform, alongside safeguarding, fraud monitoring, sanctions screening and anti money laundering controls.
The company processed US$19.7 billion in hotel transaction value in 2025. Regulated capabilities are expected to begin with a Netherlands pilot in late 2026 before expanding across the EEA.
Mews is taking embedded finance beyond connecting hotels to outside financial providers. Its own regulated entity can now sit inside the software where hotel revenue, operations and payments already meet. That changes the regulatory boundary for embedded finance: vertical software can become part of the licensed financial infrastructure instead of remaining only the distribution layer.
TransFi launched JARVIS, a proprietary compliance intelligence platform that combines KYC and sanctions screening, internet profiling, behavioural and biometric signals, and fiat and blockchain transaction monitoring.
JARVIS builds risk profiles, uses heuristics and AI research to recommend actions on high confidence matches, and escalates complex or ambiguous cases for human review.
Final KYC, KYB, transaction monitoring and screening decisions remain with TransFi's compliance team under MLRO oversight.
AI is entering compliance as an investigation and decision support layer rather than replacing accountable human approval. That model fits the emerging market for AI powered compliance workflows where evidence, escalation, auditability and human control determine whether automation can be trusted. TransFi's operating test is whether JARVIS reduces review effort across multiple jurisdictions without weakening decision quality.
Trezor disclosed that a breach at shipping provider ShipMonk exposed customer information including names, email addresses, phone numbers and shipping addresses.
Approximately 11,742 customers had full contact and shipping information exposed, while another 1,947 had partial exposure, bringing the affected total to about 13,689 customers.
Trezor says its own systems, devices and services were not compromised. The company warns that the exposed information could instead be used for more sophisticated phishing and impersonation attempts.
The breach shows how self custody can inherit risk from suppliers that never touch a private key. Fulfilment providers still hold enough identity and location data to expose hardware wallet owners to targeted attacks, making vendor controls and data retention part of hardware wallet security rather than a separate privacy issue.
Weekly Close
Financial infrastructure is becoming easier to enter and harder to operate well. Bank switching is getting simpler, payments are becoming programmable, AI agents are gaining spending authority and software platforms are taking on regulated financial roles. At the same time, regulators are putting more weight on governance, settlement discipline, market access and accountability. The competitive advantage is moving toward firms that can combine better distribution with stronger control of the infrastructure underneath it.
The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, artificial intelligence, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org
August 14, 2026 | NCFA Companies On The Move | Artificial Intelligence And Data, Risk Compliance And Regtech, Banking And Credit
Enterprise AI Moves From Content Processing Into Governed Workflows
Founded2021
OriginToronto, Canada
FounderAdrian Murray
Company StageAccelerate / Commercialize
Fisent Technologies is a Toronto enterprise AI company founded in 2021 by Adrian Murray. Its BizAI platform reads and interprets unstructured content such as applications, claims, statements, contracts and correspondence, then turns the results into data and actions that existing business workflows can use.
The company now has enough operating evidence to look beyond the technology itself. Fisent says BizAI has more than 20 enterprise use cases in production, with customers across banking, lending, wealth management, insurance and other industries. Public examples include Aruba Bank through Orco Group, AEGIS London, CMG Financial and Westinghouse.
On August 11, Fisent closed a US$4.3 million venture round led by FINTOP, bringing disclosed funding to US$6.3 million. The financing arrives after Fisent reported 206% revenue growth in 2025, 173% net revenue retention and a third consecutive year without customer churn. Those percentages are company-reported, and Fisent does not disclose the revenue amount or total customer count.
Why Regulated Enterprises Are Buying Fisent
Banks, insurers and other large companies still receive important information in documents, emails, forms, scans and files that don't arrive in one clean structure. Employees have to read the content, decide what it means, enter the relevant information and route the work. Fisent is selling automation into that gap.
In 2024, Orco Group used BizAI at Aruba Bank to process documents following its acquisition of CIBC FirstCaribbean operations. The company case study reports a 90% decrease in errors, more than 70% faster processing and capacity for as many as 10,000 unstructured documents a day. Those are customer case-study results, not audited benchmarks.
In mortgage lending, CMG Financial selected BizAI for underwriting and processing workflows. AEGIS London has deployed it for insurance endorsement processing. Outside financial services, Pega independently featured Westinghouse and Fisent at PegaWorld 2026, describing a live workflow that combines Fisent's AI with Pega automation to improve parts fulfillment and route exceptions to people.
Those examples give Fisent something many enterprise AI companies still lack, which is proof that customers are putting the software into operating workflows. That is especially useful in regulated finance, where AI adoption depends on controls, data quality and third party oversight as much as model capability.
Adrian Murray, Founder and CEO, Fisent:
“Enterprises are moving beyond AI experimentation and choosing the capabilities they can trust to operate at scale.”
BizAI Sits Between Enterprise Content And Existing Workflows
BizAI can classify content, split complex files, extract information, verify it against defined criteria, analyze context and standardize tables. Fisent lets customers choose different models and hosting options, then uses its GenAI Efficacy Framework to compare model configurations on measures such as accuracy, speed, consistency and cost.
That model flexibility is important when a bank or insurer doesn't want one provider deciding where its data is processed or which model supports every use case. Fisent says its default architecture retains no customer content and does not use customer data to train models. The company completed a SOC 2 Type II examination in 2025 and says its controls were expanded during that year's review.
BizAI Studio launched in May 2026, giving business and automation teams a visual environment to design, test, deploy and maintain workflows with review gates, versioning and traceability. That changes where Fisent competes. A customer can build directly with a model provider, use AI functions inside a large workflow platform, buy a document-processing product or use Fisent as the content intelligence layer between models and existing systems. Fisent has to keep earning that position as larger platforms add their own AI capabilities.
Pega is particularly important because it is both an investor and a workflow partner. That relationship gives Fisent a route into enterprise processes already running on Pega, while also making the surrounding platform ecosystem part of its distribution strategy. Governed financial AI increasingly depends on exactly these workflow controls: permissions, evidence, review, escalation and records of what the system did.
Pricing isn't public. Fisent reports strong growth in licensing revenue and enterprise expansion, but contract size, recurring revenue mix and implementation economics remain private.
FINTOP Adds Capital And A Bank Distribution Option
Fisent's bottleneck is changing. It already has product and deployment evidence. The next job is selling and implementing it repeatedly across more large enterprises.
The US$4.3 million round is Fisent's first priced venture financing and follows US$2 million of earlier disclosed investment from investors including Pega, Cloudberry Pioneer Investments and Sand Dollar Capital. Pega participated again in the FINTOP round, and FINTOP Partner John Philpott is joining Fisent's board.
FINTOP says its strategic investor network includes about 100 banks with US$1.3 trillion in combined assets, along with other financial services companies. That network doesn't automatically give Fisent 100 prospects, pilots or customers. It does put an investor with deep financial institution relationships beside a company trying to sell regulated enterprise AI.
Fisent says the new capital will expand sales, customer enablement, deployment engineering and product development while widening distribution through workflow and technology partners. Those uses fit the current stage. Enterprise AI can fail commercially even when the model works if implementation takes too much specialist effort or every customer becomes a custom project.
Fisent Is In The Commercialization Stage
Fisent reports impressive growth in 2025 with 206% total revenue growth, 365% licensing revenue growth and 173% net revenue retention. It says customers now run more than three BizAI implementations on average, 90% added at least one production use case during 2025 and none has churned in three years.
Those numbers reflect expansion inside existing accounts. They don't tell us how large Fisent is in absolute terms. Revenue, profitability, valuation, contract values and total customer count are not public. Its first Fortune 50 customer in 2026 is also a company-reported milestone and the customer has not been named.
The evidence puts Fisent beyond initial validation without placing it in the same scale category as established enterprise platforms. Its current position is best described as Accelerate / Commercialize: real production use, repeat deployments and rising revenue, with absolute scale still private.
The FINTOP round raises the commercial bar. More named financial institution deployments, a larger base of repeatable implementations and evidence that BizAI Studio reduces deployment work would show that Fisent can grow without services effort rising at the same pace as software adoption.
On the NCFA Financial Innovation Map, Fisent sits where enterprise AI, workflow automation, financial operations and regtech meet.
The Company Intelligence Snapshot below follows the evidence that brings Fisent from formation into its current commercialization stage.
NCFA Company Intelligence Snapshot
Fisent Technologies
Enterprise AI for turning unstructured content into governed workflow actions
Named EvidenceWestinghouse, AEGIS London, CMG Financial, Orco Group / Aruba Bank and Connection
Financial ServicesBanking, lending, wealth management and insurance workflows
SecuritySOC 2 Type II; zero retention by default
Business ModelEnterprise software and implementation relationships; pricing and revenue amount are private
Milestones
Select a milestone to follow Fisent from formation through enterprise commercialization and its 2026 FINTOP financing
1Foundation2021
2BizAI Commercialization2024
3Enterprise Adoption2025
4Product Expansion2026
5FINTOP RoundAug 2026
Milestone 1
Financial Technology Experience Leads To Fisent (2021)
Adrian Murray founded Fisent in Toronto in 2021 after more than a decade working in financial services technology and operations, including core banking, digital banking, compliance, regtech and payments.
Company
FisentToronto financial technology company
Stage
FoundationCompany formation and early product work
Capital
PrivateEarly financing details not publicly disclosed
Markets
Financial ServicesBanking technology, compliance and operations
Customers
UnavailableEarly customer evidence is not public
Competition
Enterprise AutomationWorkflow and financial technology providers
Additional Company Data
Murray previously led end to end technology infrastructure at a de novo digital bank
Fisent is headquartered in Toronto
Current COO Brent Baiotto and CTO Jeff Irving add financial services and enterprise technology experience
NCFA Perspective
Fisent's foundation gives the company operating knowledge of financial institutions before generative AI becomes its commercial focus.
Milestone 2
BizAI Reaches Enterprise Workflows And Strategic Investors (2024)
Fisent brought BizAI into enterprise use and announced strategic investment from Pega, Sand Dollar Capital and other investors. Early disclosed deployments included banks, an insurer and a Fortune 1000 company, while Orco Group used BizAI at Aruba Bank for post-acquisition document processing.
Company
Fisent BizAIGenAI content automation enters production work
Stage
CommercializationInitial enterprise deployments become visible
Capital
Strategic SeedPega, Sand Dollar Capital and other investors
Markets
Regulated EnterpriseBanking, insurance and enterprise operations
Customers
Production UseNamed and unnamed enterprise deployments
Competition
Build Or BuyInternal AI builds and automation platforms are alternatives
BizAI was positioned as a layer connecting GenAI models with enterprise applications
Pega became both a strategic investor and workflow partner
NCFA Perspective
This milestone establishes Fisent's first visible production evidence and a strategic relationship with a major enterprise workflow provider.
Milestone 3
Named Customers And Repeat Deployments Strengthen The Case (2025)
Fisent brought disclosed funding to US$2 million, completed SOC 2 Type II work and added named enterprise evidence across insurance, mortgage lending and manufacturing. AEGIS London, CMG Financial and Westinghouse were among the customers publicly connected to BizAI.
Company
Enterprise AI VendorProduction use expands across customer functions
Stage
Enterprise AdoptionNamed buyers and repeated use cases
Capital
US$2MTotal disclosed seed funding by May 2025
Markets
Several IndustriesFinance, insurance, lending and manufacturing
Customers
Named EnterprisesAEGIS, CMG and Westinghouse among disclosed relationships
Competition
Operational ProofProduction results become more important than model access
Westinghouse implemented BizAI for parts and equipment fulfillment
NCFA Perspective
Fisent no longer relies on AI demonstrations alone. Named buyers are putting BizAI into operating workflows with real control and performance requirements.
Milestone 4
Studio Gives Customers More Control Over Deployment (2026)
Fisent launched BizAI Studio in May 2026 so customer teams could design, test, deploy and refine content automation workflows through a user-facing environment. The company also reported strong 2025 expansion inside existing customer accounts.
Company
BizAI PlatformCustomers gain more self-service configuration
Stage
Accelerate / CommercializeProduct breadth and account usage expand
Capital
Existing Seed BaseProduct develops ahead of next priced round
Markets
Enterprise OperationsMore workflows can be configured by customer teams
Customers
Account ExpansionCompany reports more than three implementations per customer on average
Competition
Deployment EfficiencySelf-service can reduce dependence on specialist implementation work
Growth inside existing accounts carries more weight than a long pipeline alone. Studio can strengthen that pattern if customers deploy additional workflows with less Fisent engineering work.
Milestone 5
FINTOP Backs The Next Commercialization Stage (August 2026)
FINTOP led Fisent's US$4.3 million first priced venture round, taking total disclosed funding to US$6.3 million. Pega participated again and FINTOP Partner John Philpott joined the board.
Company
Fisent TechnologiesEnterprise content automation company entering a larger sales phase
Stage
Accelerate / CommercializeProduction evidence is established; absolute scale remains private
Capital
US$4.3MUS$6.3M total disclosed funding
Markets
Regulated EnterpriseFinancial institutions remain a priority market
Customers
Fortune 50First Fortune 50 customer reported by Fisent in 2026; customer unnamed
Competition
DistributionBank relationships and deployment capacity become more important
FINTOP's network is a potential distribution asset, not evidence of Fisent customer contracts
NCFA Perspective
The financing gives Fisent more capacity to turn existing production evidence into repeatable enterprise distribution. Customer count, revenue scale and deployment economics will show how far commercialization progresses.
Frequently Asked Questions About Fisent Technologies
What is Fisent Technologies?
Fisent Technologies is a Toronto enterprise AI software company founded in 2021. Its BizAI platform processes unstructured content and connects the results to enterprise workflows in financial services and other industries.
Who founded Fisent Technologies?
Adrian Murray founded Fisent in 2021. His background includes more than a decade in financial services technology and operations covering digital banking, core banking, compliance, regtech and payments.
Is Fisent a Canadian company?
Fisent was founded in Toronto and lists its headquarters in Toronto, Canada. It sells enterprise software to customers in Canada and international markets.
What does Fisent BizAI do?
BizAI reads and interprets unstructured and multimodal content, then classifies, splits, extracts, verifies, analyzes or standardizes information so it can be used inside enterprise workflows. Representative financial services uses include KYC, onboarding, claims, disputes, lending documents and account-transfer processing.
Named public relationships include Westinghouse, AEGIS London, CMG Financial, Orco Group / Aruba Bank and Connection. Fisent also says it serves Fortune 500 customers across banking, lending, wealth management and insurance, although not every customer is publicly named.
Fisent does not disclose its revenue amount or profitability. The company reported 206% year over year total revenue growth and 365% licensing revenue growth for 2025, but the underlying revenue base remains private.
What does Fisent's 173% net revenue retention mean?
Fisent reports 173% net revenue retention for 2025, which indicates that revenue from the measured existing customer base increased after expansion and any losses were included. Fisent has not published the underlying customer count, revenue base or calculation detail needed to independently reproduce the figure.
Is Fisent a regulated financial institution?
No. Fisent is an enterprise software provider, not a bank, insurer, investment dealer or financial advisor. Its regulated customers remain responsible for their own compliance, customer decisions, technology oversight and use of third party AI.
Does Fisent depend on one AI model?
No. Fisent markets BizAI as model and host optional. Its GenAI Efficacy Framework is designed to compare model configurations using measures such as accuracy, speed, consistency and cost for a particular workflow.
Who competes with Fisent?
Fisent competes with several approaches rather than one exact category. Enterprises can build directly with foundation models, use AI inside large workflow platforms, adopt specialist document and content automation software or combine those tools internally. Fisent's position depends on making unstructured content usable inside governed workflows without requiring customers to build and maintain the whole AI layer themselves.
What does FINTOP add to Fisent?
FINTOP brings new capital, fintech operating experience and a strategic investor network that it says includes about 100 banks with US$1.3 trillion in combined assets. That may help Fisent reach more financial institutions, but the network should not be interpreted as 100 customers or guaranteed introductions.
Related NCFA Intelligence
Continue into the operating and governance questions surrounding enterprise AI in regulated finance.
Information notice: Private company estimates are identified and attributed. Information may change after the stated update date. This content is provided for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment, financial or legal advice.
The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, artificial intelligence, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org
Aug 1, 2026 | NCFA Fintech Whisperer | Digital Assets Blockchain And Tokenization, Treasury Liquidity, Embedded Finance, Artificial Intelligence And Data, Cybersecurity Fraud And Financial Crime, SME Finance And Business Banking, Payments Infrastructure And Money Movement, Capital Markets Infrastructure And Funding, Regulation And Policy, Risk Compliance And Regtech
AMD reached a definitive agreement to acquire Toronto based Taalas, whose specialized silicon is designed to reduce compute and memory bottlenecks in AI inference. The transaction remains subject to regulatory approvals and other closing conditions.
AMD plans to integrate Taalas technology into its AI accelerator roadmap and develop system level solutions alongside AMD Instinct GPUs, bringing the Canadian company’s inference architecture into one of the major global AI computing platforms.
Taalas was founded in Toronto in 2023. AMD says it intends to retain and grow the Canadian team as part of its semiconductor and AI presence in the country.
The acquisition puts Canadian inference technology inside AMD as competition for AI compute intensifies. NCFA’s deeper look at the Taalas acquisition examines the Canadian tradeoff more closely: engineering can remain here while ownership, capital allocation and the commercial direction of the technology move inside a global semiconductor company.
Scotiabank introduced three governed knowledge agents through Scotia Intelligence: Delivery Navigator, the Travel and Expense Knowledge Agent and the Procurement Knowledge Agent.
The agents draw from approved internal information sources to help employees find policies, procedures and operational guidance. Scotiabank has not said they independently approve projects, expenses or procurement decisions.
More than 71,000 employees have access to Scotia Intelligence, and the bank reports that employees have generated 14 million actions through the platform.
More than 80% of Scotiabank’s global workforce and over 90% of employees at director level or higher have completed at least one internal AI course.
“Actions” is Scotiabank’s usage measure. It does not represent completed workflows, hours saved, financial returns or the number of active employees.
Scotiabank is progressing from general AI assistance to governed financial workflows built around approved information sources and defined employee tasks. The next measures are repeat usage, time saved, answer quality and whether the agents can support more complex work without weakening human review, data controls or accountability.
AMD reached a definitive agreement to acquire Toronto based Taalas, whose specialized silicon is designed to reduce compute and memory bottlenecks in AI inference. The transaction remains subject to regulatory approvals and other closing conditions.
AMD plans to integrate Taalas technology into its AI accelerator roadmap and develop system level solutions alongside AMD Instinct GPUs, bringing the Canadian company’s inference architecture into one of the major global AI computing platforms.
Taalas was founded in 2023 and has built its engineering team in Canada. AMD says it intends to retain and grow that team as part of its existing Canadian semiconductor and AI presence.
The acquisition puts differentiated Canadian AI infrastructure inside AMD as competition for inference performance intensifies. It also adds another example to the question of who owns Canadian AI infrastructure as domestic companies scale. Taalas keeps its engineering base in Canada, but its technology, capital requirements and commercial reach will now sit inside AMD’s global platform.
Article 50 of the EU AI Act now requires providers of covered generative AI systems to mark artificially generated or manipulated audio, images, video and text in a machine-readable and detectable format.
Organizations using AI professionally must disclose deepfakes and public-interest text generated or manipulated by AI when it lacks human review, editorial control and an accountable publisher.
People must also be informed when they interact directly with certain AI systems or are exposed to emotion-recognition and biometric-categorization tools.
The Commission’s AI content icons are optional, but the underlying disclosure requirements are mandatory. Content released before August 2 does not require retroactive labelling.
Europe has turned AI-content provenance into an operating compliance requirement. Banks, fintechs, insurers, publishers and AI providers now need controls that preserve machine-readable markings across creation, editing, distribution and resharing while documenting when human editorial oversight creates an exception.
Circle scheduled Arc’s public mainnet launch for September 16. The network is currently operating as a private mainnet with more than 100 institutional and ecosystem builders.
BlackRock, DTCC, Galaxy, Global Payments, ICE, Mastercard, MoneyGram, SBI Group, Standard Chartered, Sumitomo Corporation and Visa are joining Circle as founding validators.
BlackRock is expected to deploy its BUIDL tokenized fund on Arc, while Circle and DTCC are working toward tokenizing DTC-custodied assets on the network beginning in the second half of 2027.
Circle plans to introduce an application framework, AI-powered development tools and capabilities for issuing and managing tokenized real-world assets when the public network launches.
Arc supports open application development but operates through a permissioned validator set. Circle states that planned features remain subject to modification, delay or cancellation.
Circle is placing banks, asset managers, market infrastructure providers and payment networks inside the operation of its blockchain rather than treating them only as users. The next test is whether Arc launches on schedule with live institutional integrations, meaningful transaction activity and connections to assets and liquidity outside Circle’s own ecosystem.
South Africa’s National Treasury and Reserve Bank published a draft Crypto Assets Manual governing cross-border crypto activities.
A transfer becomes reportable when crypto moves between an authorized South African crypto asset service provider and an offshore provider, or from a domestic provider to a non-custodial wallet.
Authorized providers would report qualifying inflows and outflows to the Reserve Bank’s Financial Surveillance Department and comply with specified authorization, monitoring and administrative requirements.
Initially, only individuals could transfer crypto offshore through authorized providers using their single discretionary or foreign capital allowances.
The proposal doesn’t give crypto legal tender status or distinguish between different types of crypto assets. Comments are due September 30, 2026.
South Africa is bringing offshore platforms and self-custodied wallets inside its capital flow controls without treating every domestic crypto transaction as cross-border. The framework could improve regulatory visibility, but its operating impact will depend on authorization capacity, reporting costs and whether users continue using regulated channels when transferring assets internationally.
Mastercard and PEXA will explore programmable account-to-account payments that reserve buyer funds and release them automatically only when agreed property completion conditions are met.
The proposed model is expected to be tested through Mastercard’s A2A Sandbox, combining PEXA’s digital property completion infrastructure with Mastercard’s payment orchestration capabilities and Vocalink’s UK account-to-account infrastructure.
The work builds on PEXA’s Bank of England Synchronisation Lab use case, which is testing coordination between lender funds held in the renewed RTGS service and property title lodgement.
Property completion gives programmable finance a demanding test because payment release depends on a verified event outside the payment system. Banks and infrastructure providers will need clear rules for defining completion conditions, confirming title status, cancelling reserved funds, handling failed transactions and assigning liability across the payment and property networks.
Wells Fargo plans to launch tokenized deposits for corporate and commercial clients during fall 2026.
Clients would be able to transfer, program and settle bank deposits around the clock using blockchain infrastructure. The product is a tokenized commercial bank deposit, not a stablecoin.
The initial product will support U.S. dollars and British pounds for cross-border payments, with additional countries and currencies planned for 2027 based on client demand.
The deposits will operate on Wells Fargo’s proprietary blockchain platform. The bank said the product could connect with private networks and the planned U.S. bank-led tokenized deposit network.
Wells Fargo hasn’t disclosed whether initial transfers will be limited to its own customers or which operating jurisdictions will receive access first.
Wells Fargo is bringing programmable commercial bank money into corporate treasury while banks compete with stablecoins for always-on settlement. The next test is whether clients can move funds beyond Wells Fargo’s customer and network boundaries without losing the speed, control and regulatory treatment that make tokenized deposits attractive.
FIS launched Digital One Commercial in Asia-Pacific, completing the platform’s availability across the United States, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and Asia-Pacific.
The core-agnostic platform combines business payments, cash management, trade finance, foreign exchange and corporate treasury services through one commercial-banking interface.
FIS says one unnamed Asia-Pacific bank operates the platform across 15 countries, serving approximately 350,000 business customers and more than one million end users from a single instance.
The platform supports regional payment infrastructure including PayNow, GIRO and FAST, alongside SWIFT and ISO-based messaging, multiple languages, currencies and time zones.
The announcement does not identify the bank. The reported customer and user figures describe the existing deployment and should not be treated as customers acquired through this launch.
FIS now has bank-issued digital money infrastructure and a commercial-banking platform spanning payments, treasury and trade finance. The immediate test is whether one shared platform can handle local payment rails, regulatory requirements and corporate workflows while reducing the cost and complexity of entering additional markets.
Nuvei and BlackLine integrated payment acceptance directly into BlackLine’s invoice-presentment and payment workflows. The companies say the integration is already being used by enterprise customers.
Businesses can accept cards, bank transfers and local payment methods from invoices and automatically match incoming payments to outstanding receivables.
The workflow gives finance teams payment-status and cash-position visibility while providing customers with one interface to view, question and pay invoices.
The integration supports collections in 150 currencies from more than 190 markets.
The announcement does not identify participating customers or disclose customer counts, payment volume, collection-time improvements or cost savings.
Nuvei is moving payment acceptance and reconciliation into the enterprise receivables stack instead of leaving payment as a separate process. The operating test is whether live deployments reduce unmatched receivables and improve collection visibility across complex international operations.
August 4, 2026, India / United Arab Emirates / Middle East / Africa
Mintoak acquired Dubai-headquartered ICC Loyalty, adding consumer rewards and loyalty capabilities to its bank-distributed merchant platform.
The acquisition extends Mintoak’s platform beyond merchant payments and business tools into customer engagement, rewards and retention services.
Banks and financial institutions using Mintoak will be able to offer the combined capabilities through their own digital channels and customer relationships.
The transaction supports Mintoak’s expansion across the Middle East and Africa, where it distributes financial technology through banks and merchant acquirers.
The acquisition connects merchant services and consumer loyalty inside one bank-controlled platform. The next test is whether financial institutions use the combined infrastructure to strengthen SME relationships, increase customer activity and compete with standalone payment and commerce platforms.
Allied Universal plans to offer Chime Workplace to approximately 320,000 North American employees at no cost to the company or its workforce.
The workplace package combines earned-wage access, savings paying up to 3.75% APY, investing and credit-building tools inside one employer-distributed service.
Allied Universal receives a workplace portal showing how participating employees use the benefit to save, build credit and manage their financial activity.
At First Student, 46% of actively enrolled employees began saving within two months. Chime reports that 76% of that group continued building savings.
The announcement doesn’t disclose an implementation date, enrollment target, First Student sample size or the amount employees saved.
Chime is using employers as a distribution channel for several consumer financial products rather than offering earned-wage access as a standalone benefit. The operating measures are how many eligible employees enroll, whether they use multiple products and whether the early savings behaviour continues across a workforce of this size.
The FCA launched a free API that gives firms and technology providers direct access to structured, machine readable data from the FCA Handbook.
The API automatically draws from the current Handbook and can feed rules, guidance and updates into compliance monitoring, regulatory change management and other RegTech systems.
The FCA also identifies AI as a use case, giving tools access to trusted and current regulatory data that can support more accurate and transparent outputs.
The FCA is making regulation easier for software to consume, not just easier for people to read. That creates a direct data layer between the regulator and the systems firms use to track obligations and compliance changes. It also strengthens the case for AI powered regulatory intelligence, where reliable source data is one of the constraints on using AI safely in regulated workflows.
MVB Bank selected Bretton AI under a multi year agreement to support AML transaction monitoring, KYC casework and enhanced due diligence for its fintech banking business.
Bretton combines its AI platform with a U.S. operations team, while a trained analyst reviews every AI assisted output before completed work reaches MVB.
MVB remains responsible for the compliance program, decisions and regulatory filings. Bretton charges for completed work rather than analyst hours, tying the service model to compliance output instead of staffing levels.
MVB is changing more than the software used by its compliance team. It is buying completed AML and KYC work through an AI assisted managed service while keeping responsibility for the underlying risk program. That puts the AI compliance burden into a new operating model where banks have to prove that automation, human review and outsourced execution still produce controlled and defensible decisions.
Visa agreed to acquire behavioural-biometrics and fraud-intelligence provider BioCatch for US$2.4 billion in cash.
BioCatch analyzes more than 3,000 behavioural and device indicators to distinguish legitimate customers from account takeovers, scams, money mules and application fraud before funds are transferred.
The company serves more than 350 financial institutions across 21 countries and protects approximately 760 million users operating 1.8 billion devices.
The transaction is expected to close by the end of Visa’s fiscal second quarter of 2027, subject to regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions.
Visa is assembling transaction, behavioural and device intelligence inside its global security portfolio. The competitive test is whether BioCatch helps financial institutions identify compromised customers, manipulation and mule accounts before suspicious activity reaches the payment authorization stage.
Schroders received Central Bank of Ireland approval to launch SOAR, Schroders Onchain Active Returns, as a tokenized share class of an Ireland-domiciled U.S.-dollar money-market fund.
Kinexys by J.P. Morgan will connect blockchain transactions with the fund’s transfer agent, allowing approved investors to use smart contracts for redemptions and transfers between Schroders clients.
Schroders identifies collateral use and round-the-clock treasury and liquidity management as future applications. It has not disclosed initial assets, investor transactions or live collateral activity.
Tokenization is being added to the regulated ownership and transfer records of a conventional investment fund, rather than operating as a separate digital wrapper. The next test is whether institutions use the shares for collateral, treasury and liquidity workflows, and whether onchain transfers reduce processing time without weakening investor controls, recordkeeping or legal certainty.
A New Mexico court ordered Meta to pay $567 million into a teen mental health fund, in addition to an earlier $375 million jury award. Meta says it will appeal.
The order requires changes affecting youth accounts, including usage limits, notification controls, protections against suspicious adult contact and stronger age verification.
The requirements also extend to AI chatbot interactions involving minors, deletion of data tied to underage users and twice yearly compliance reporting.
The ruling goes beyond financial penalties and reaches how a major digital platform is designed and governed. Fintechs and AI platforms should watch whether courts increasingly use product controls, age assurance, monitoring and reporting requirements to address consumer harm before legislators or regulators create wider rules.
Canada brought the Foreign Influence Transparency and Accountability Act and its regulations into force and opened a public registry of foreign influence activities.
Registration can apply when an individual or entity has an arrangement with a foreign principal, seeks to influence a Canadian political or governmental process and undertakes a covered activity. Corporations, partnerships, joint ventures, funds and associations are among the entities included.
New arrangements must be registered within 14 days. Arrangements that existed before August 4 must be registered by October 3, 2026, with administrative penalties ranging from $250 to $1 million for violations.
Fintech companies, funds and industry associations can fall within the regime when coordinated work with a foreign principal involves policy advocacy, public communications or government decision making. Routine international business relationships alone are insufficient under the Commissioner’s guidance. Organizations with covered activity need to identify the arrangement, document who directs or coordinates the work and keep the registry information current.
The South African Reserve Bank proposed an authorization and supervision framework for crypto-asset service providers facilitating transactions treated as cross-border capital flows.
The draft manual sets out application requirements, permitted transactions, operating conditions, recordkeeping and regulatory reporting obligations for authorized providers.
The framework follows five regulatory-sandbox use cases. Comments close September 30, 2026, and implementation remains dependent on final Capital Flow Management Regulations.
South Africa is bringing cross-border crypto transfers inside its capital-flow controls rather than treating them only as domestic virtual-asset activity. Providers will need to connect wallet and transaction infrastructure with customer records, regulatory reporting and exchange-control permissions. The final rules will determine which transfers can proceed routinely and which require additional authorization.
Conclusion
AI agents need clear authority. Payments need verified conditions before money is released. Tokenized funds still need trusted records. Cross border crypto still has to fit inside regulatory controls. The technology can act faster, but firms still need to know who can act, what they can approve and which record settles the outcome.
The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, artificial intelligence, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org
August 7, 2026 | NCFA Insight | Capital Markets And Market Infrastructure, SME Finance And Business Banking, Public Sector Policy And Industrial Strategy
Canadian VC Growth Masks A Thinner Funding Pipeline
Canadian venture capital reached $2.69 billion across 250 deals in the first half of 2026, according to the CVCA's latest market data. Capital invested rose 17% from H1 2025, the first year-over-year increase in first-half dollars since 2021.
Deal count moved the other way. It fell 8.8% from 274 to 250, marking a fifth consecutive first-half decline, while average financing size increased from $8.4 million to $11.38 million.
Canada is putting more venture capital to work without funding more companies. Larger rounds are lifting the national total while seed financing continues to weaken.
More Money Is Concentrating In Larger Rounds
H1 2026
Capital
Deals
Avg. Deal
YoY
Total VC
$2.69B
250
$11.38M
Capital +17%; deals -8.8%
Seed
$285M
82
~$3.5M
Capital -31%; deals -13%
Early Stage
$1.18B
68
~$17.4M
Capital +29%; deals essentially flat
Later Stage
$984M
18
$54.67M
Capital +23%; eight fewer deals
Sixteen rounds of $50 million or more absorbed $1.57 billion, or 59% of all capital invested. Five financings above $100 million alone accounted for $807 million, equal to 30% of the national total.
Most transactions were much smaller. Deals below $25 million represented 85% of disclosed financings but received only 32% of the money. Another 155 rounds closed below $5 million and collectively attracted $221 million.
Seed is the clearest warning in the report. Investment fell 31% to $285 million across 82 deals, while transaction count declined 13%. Pre-seed added $52 million across 56 financings, with an average round below $1 million.
Early stage looks healthier at $1.18 billion, up 29%, but the number of financings barely changed. More capital went into roughly the same number of companies, pushing the average early-stage round to about $17.4 million.
Later-stage financing is even more concentrated. The $984 million invested was spread across only 18 transactions, the lowest first-half deal count in CVCA's series. The average round reached $54.67 million.
For founders, companies with traction and scale can still attract large rounds, while the market for the first few million dollars is getting tighter.
Some of that friction is structural. Smaller Canadian financings can carry disproportionately high compliance costs because many legal, disclosure and regulatory costs do not get proportionally cheaper as the raise gets smaller. Ontario's decision to join Canada's securities passport should reduce some duplication, but it does not by itself solve the economics of small-company financing.
There is also a financing-fit problem. Merchant Growth founder David Gens argues that many smaller businesses are asset light and cash-flow driven, while traditional lending still relies heavily on assets that can be pledged as collateral. After nearly $1.5 billion deployed to about 15,000 Canadian small businesses, his point is practical: access to capital and access to financing that fits the business are not the same thing.
Those problems compound. A company may need grants, founder capital, crowdfunding, angel money, debt and venture financing at different points in its growth. Canada's small-business capital access gap is therefore less about finding one missing source of money than making it easier for companies to move from one financing stage to the next.
If fewer businesses get financed near the bottom, fewer can build the traction needed to compete for the larger rounds that are keeping Canada's headline VC numbers up.
Fintech Shows What It Takes To Raise At Scale
Financial technology supplied four of the larger disclosed rounds in the first half. KOHO raised $130 million, nesto $107 million, Float $85.4 million and Relay $68.8 million. Together they represent almost $392 million in financing.
KOHO has been building toward banking scale, adding credit products and pursuing a Schedule 1 bank licence. Its $130 million Series E was one of the largest disclosed Canadian VC financings in H1.
Float has been expanding its SME finance platform across business accounts, spend management and working-capital products. Its $85.4 million H1 financing followed earlier equity financing and continued expansion into business banking and credit.
Relay has been scaling its SMB finance platform, raising US$50 million in its Series B as it expanded banking and cash-flow tools for small businesses. The CVCA records its H1 2026 financing at $68.8 million in Canadian-dollar terms.
These companies already have products, customers and operating histories. Their ability to attract larger rounds shows where capital is still available, while the weaker seed numbers show how much harder it may be for the next group to reach that point.
Foreign Capital Still Matters At The Top
U.S. investors participated in 28.0% of Canadian VC transactions in H1, up from 25.9% in 2025. European participation reached 10.8%, the highest share in the six-year series, while 66.4% of transactions were financed exclusively by Canadian investors.
The money also remains geographically concentrated. Ontario, Quebec and British Columbia accounted for 91% of capital and 80% of transactions. Toronto led with $879.7 million across 64 deals, followed by Montreal with $619 million across 50.
For founders that reach scale, Canada remains connected to large domestic and international pools of capital. For investors, the concern is whether enough new companies (read: Canada's farm team) are being financed underneath them to keep producing attractive later-stage opportunities.
The Headline Recovery Hides A Thinner Pipeline
H1 2026 looks better than H1 2025 if the measure is dollars invested. It looks weaker if the measure is how many companies received venture financing, and weaker again at seed.
For founders, proof of traction and financing readiness carry more weight in a selective market. For investors, larger rounds remain available, but a shrinking seed base can become a sourcing problem several years down the road.
Canada needs capital at both ends. Proven companies need enough money to scale, while younger companies need financing that fits where they are today and gives them a realistic way to reach the next stage. The CVCA numbers show stronger deployment at the top of the market, but they don't show yet at the mid way point of 2026 that the pipeline feeding it is getting healthier.
The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, artificial intelligence, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org
The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, artificial intelligence, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. 
