Karsten Wenzlaff, Advisor
August 26th, 2025
Welcome to Fintech Confidential, your essential guide to the global fintech and funding landscape. Brought to you by the National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association of Canada (NCFA) and our partners, each issue dives into the latest trends, innovations, and insights in the fintech world. From insider views to regulatory developments, we keep you informed and inspired. Enjoy the read and share the knowledge. Onwards and upwards in the world of fintech!
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, 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
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About NCFA Canada | Craig Asano | Oct 7, 2021

Dear Global Fintech & Funding Communities,
The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association of Canada (NCFA) and partners are excited to present Vol. 1 Issue 4, FINTECH CONFIDENTIAL, a digital pop-up of the 7th annual 2021 Fintech & Financing Conference and Expo (FFCON21) held virtually from May 11-13 and co-hosted by NCFA and Toronto Finance International (TFI).
As global economies strive to contain the latest Covid outbreak and recover fragile sectors, fintech innovators continue to ‘BREAK BARRIERS’, the main theme of this year’s conference, and the second year in partnership with TFI, reflecting the growth and emerging challenges that the Canadian Fintech industry must navigate to achieve mass adoption and scale.
Fintech is not a niche but a permanent technological evolution that is changing the world of finance by high growth fintech companies and incumbent financial institutions. It’s setting new standards and demanding new regulations. It’s about delivering better financial products, services, and outcomes for everyone especially consumers and small to midsize enterprises (SMEs).
It’s been another unprecedented year with covid accelerating trends such as bitcoin’s institutionalization, the growing power of retail investors, the 2nd round of Open Banking consultations and the advisory committee’s recommendations to the federal government, payment modernization efforts, adoption of harmonized Crowdfunding regulation, AI roadmap, emergence of digital identity as a ‘right’ and core data infrastructure (ie., vaccine passports), growing support for Purpose (not just shareholder profit), green finance solutions tackling shared global problems such as SDGs and climate change, EDI (equality, diversity and inclusion), and regulatory push back and a firm ‘line in the sand’ for Big Tech.
FFCON21 was a successful event attracting over 100+ thought leaders, 75 partners, 500+ attendees, an NFT charity fundraiser in partnership with CanadaHelps for front line workers, and our second annual 2021 Fintech Draft competition -- a pitching event inspired by sports league drafts and designed to identity emerging high growth fintech ventures. A hearty congratulations to the winners: Agryo (Overall) and Copia Wealth Studios (People’s Choice)!
Thank you to all the partners, speakers, attendees, volunteers, and the entire organizing team for making ‘Breaking Barriers’ an impactful and amazing online experience and for being part of Canada’s fintech and funding community. We hope you enjoy reading this special edition of Fintech Confidential.
Finally, we continue to encourage the community to be mindful of others, and to do the right thing. Dream big, be open to partnerships, and execute like your life depends on it -- it’s not too late to participate. The world is changing because of you but there is a long bridge to cross, and more glass ceilings to break. Onwards and upwards…
All the best
Craig Asano
Founder and CEO
NCFA Canada
Note to readers: the publishing platform's 'hot spot editor' is currently down (but we wanted to publish before Canada's Thanksgiving Long Weekend. We'll add in audio and links to the document shortly. Thanks for your patience!
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, 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
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PayTechs of Canada | Alex Vronces | Oct 7, 2021

It’s a question Tyler Cowen, one of my favourite public intellectuals, poses to guests on his podcast. The question turns simple conversation into meta-conversation. It moves you from discussing something to discussing the discussion of something. The question is almost magical, like a spell that makes you disappear only to reappear on a new cognitive plane.
So let’s pop the question: is the fintech policy agenda overrated or underrated? The answer depends on who’s asking.
Currently, the federal government is reviewing Canada’s approach to financial sector policy to put fintechs on a level playing with banks. Open banking is supposed to let fintechs access Canadians’ financial information, giving fintechs the means to offer better products and services. The government is also exploring whether to give fintechs access to the payments infrastructure our economy runs on — a privilege exclusively afforded to financial institutions, such as banks. Let’s call these two initiatives the fintech policy agenda.
The median voter likely doesn’t even know what the fintech agenda is. Is open banking about keeping my bank branch open longer? I make payments whenever I tap my card at the point of sale, so what’s the problem? In fact, the median voter likely doesn’t know what a fintech is, let alone what problems the fintech agenda is meant to solve and how it would solve them.
It’s not that payments modernization and open banking don’t belong on the fintech policy agenda. They do, but they’re not the only things that do.
For example, how future proofed is the fintech policy policy agenda when payments modernization and open banking are at risk of having a short shelf life? Consider DeFi, or decentralized finance, a contender for crypto’s killer app. DeFi refers to the distribution of financial services on the blockchain. As Stephanie Choo, a partner at Portage Ventures, recently wrote, DeFi “has the potential to become for financial services what the Internet has been for media production and distribution.”
The promise of DeFi comes from innovation in governance. It erodes the power that rent-seeking intermediaries, such as banks and legacy payment networks, have long had, while circumventing the barrier to entry-laden oversight that governments have long had.
The risk of obsolescence DeFi brings to payments modernization is easy to see.
An endangered intermediary, Payments Canada is building a real-time payment system called the real-time rail, while the government consults on giving fintechs access to it. Fintechs support both initiatives — and for good reason — but DeFi could obliterate the need for both if it matures into something more ubiquitous. It’s no wonder someone once told me that Canada is building railroads while the world is building airplanes.
The risk of obsolescence DeFi brings to open banking is also easy to see.
Another intermediary-centric initiative, open banking compels banks to open their data-loaded vaults to financial-app developers. What I said of payments modernization is also true of open banking: fintechs support open banking, and for good reason. But open banking does little good in a world where financial services have been disintermediated and user data is on the blockchain.
Jon Stokes, who co-founded Ars Technica, recently described the status quo of data governance as a “decentralized network of siloed (user data) tables connected by access-controlled APIs.” Stokes thinks we could see the de-siloing and aggregation of user data on the blockchain. If open banking promotes competition, then blockchain-based data portability promotes competition on steroids.
If you think such visions are speculative, you’re not alone. No one knows what the future of financial services has in store, just like no one knew what the future of media distribution before the Internet had in store.
It’s too early to tell which way DeFi will go, which is why experimentation is so important. But DeFi experimentation is going to be tricky, as it’s prone to undermining itself.
The government’s response to DeFi has so far been an ambiguous combination of supportive and fearful — the latter state being one from which little good has ever come. For example, although the Ontario Securities Commission is allowing for some experimentation with crypto, the experimentation is limited and controlled. Moreover, the Bank of Canada announced it’s exploring how it could issue its own digital currency to crowd out the privately-issued competition, should it ever mature.
It’s not hard to see the risk that the government extinguishes too many future possibilities, killing DeFi before its potential is even meaningfully tested. This is why DeFi deserves more space on the fintech policy agenda.
Then again, perhaps you’re a DeFi bear and think DeFi deserves no more attention than it’s getting.
If that’s you, then substitute for DeFi for another idea you think is underrated. Maybe your underrated idea is sandboxing under the Bank Act, making it easier for fintechs to become banks, or maybe it’s better coordination and alignment between the provincial regulators on modernizing consumer protection and market conduct regulation. Alternatively, maybe Canada’s competition laws need to be reformed and authorities better equipped to level the playing field between incumbents and challengers.
The point is, no matter what you pick, we get to the same place: the fintech policy agenda is overrated because it’s not inclusive of what’s underrated.
If you’ve gotten this far, rest assured that there’s a way to make the fintech policy agenda appropriately rated — not overrated, not underrated, and just right. In fact, it ought to be obvious by now. Take a cue from Tyler Cowen: gather your smartest friends and play a few rounds of “overrated versus underrated” with them.
Authored by Alexander Vronces, Executive Director of PayTechs of Canada, representing the diverse community of payment technology companies operating in Canada. Using his payments and policy knowledge and network, Alex leads the push for a more competitive and innovative Canadian payments ecosystem.
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, 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
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Forbes | | Sep 16, 2021
I got an e-mail to remind me to pay my credit card bill, so I went to log in to pay it. The browser filled in my username, I entered the missing digits from my PIN and I opened 1Password to get the password and typed it in, but it was rejected.
I thought maybe I typed it wrong, so I typed it again. Nope. So I clicked on “lost password” and got taken to another page where I had to enter all sorts of personal details, including my credit limit. Catch 22. I need the credit limit to reset the password but I don’t know what my credit limit is without the password.
I give up on the web and open the app on the phone. It lets me log in without having to remember a password, so I select pay. My credit card provider likes a heritage approach to payments, so instead of an xPay option it presents me with a web screen from the 1990s and I have to get out my debit card and type in the details.
I then get redirected to my bank app and I have to enter my PIN number, OK the transaction, enter my PIN number again (I don’t know why) and then get a message saying that the transaction has been declined.
Oh well. That’s 2021 for you.
What should have happened, of course, is that I go to my credit card provider, enter my username, authenticate the log in from my bank app using my fingerprint. Then I select pay, approve the transaction from my bank app and go about my business.
There has been a change in the environment around digital identity over the past year. The coronavirus catastrophe has required many individuals, companies and organisations, who never had to do business online before, to shift to the new normal in double-quick time. This has in turn meant that the ability to create digital identities, to bind those identities to real-world legal entities and to use those digital identities to support online persona with the necessary collection of credentials to enable online transactions has become central to business and government. There has also been a change of attitude toward the business of identity and the perception of digital identity as a fundamental rather than as a “nice to have”.
Now, however, while we may be no nearer calculating the costs of having a digital identity infrastructure we now have some very accurate figures for the costs of not having a digital identity infrastructure. This is because the escalation of fraud through the pandemic has been staggering.
Why do I single out the banking industry? Well, in the past two years, 37% of American consumers have been victims of application fraud and slightly more have experienced account takeovers. Since financial institutions are on the front line, surely we should look to them for some co-ordinated action to bring the problem back under control? Where is the “bank identity”? The “financial services passport”? The “money monicker” or whatever we choose to label it?
Many countries already have some form of bank ID. Norway, for example, where the pandemic experience was utterly different from that of the USA or the UK. In Norway, the Ministry of Finance and stakeholders delivered the SME loan guarantee scheme within three weeks and the first loan was granted and on account one hour after the scheme was authorised. The pandemic compensation scheme was similarly developed within three weeks. They were able to do this because they decided to create wholly digital schemes to process applications and deliver automated payments.
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, 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
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Canadian Women in VC | Sep 28, 2021

Over the past 2 years, your participation has helped shine a light on wage standards and discrepancies and facilitated confident conversations and raises across venture capital funds in Canada.
Your participation this year will inform a 2021 Benchmark Report that will be produced by Canadian Women in VC in mid-November.
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, 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
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