Karsten Wenzlaff, Advisor
August 26th, 2025
Feb 18, 2026 | NCFA Fintech Market Activity | Payments and Remittances

Image: Freepik
On February 17 2026, OwlTing announced the launch of OwlPay Cash targeting the $230B US outbound remittance market, introducing a retail remittance app built on Visa Direct rails and supported by US money transmitter licences across 40 states.
OwlPay Cash enables local currency payouts directly into eligible bank accounts and launches with five remittance corridors Mexico, India, Colombia, Peru, and Argentina, with plans to expand to 26 regions, including Canada. Cross River Bank is mentioned as a US settlement partner.
Visa Direct integration allows push to account transfers that can settle near real time where supported. OwlTing positions the product around fee transparency, removal of monthly charges, and improved delivery speed compared to traditional SWIFT based transfers.
This puts OwlTing into a competitive field shaped by digital remittance leaders such as Wise and Remitly, both of which emphasize transparent FX pricing and fast digital delivery. Wise promotes mid market exchange rates and variable delivery speeds depending on funding method and corridor. Remitly offers tiered speed options across bank deposit and cash pickup channels. OwlTing’s differentiation rests on Visa Direct rails and corridor focus, but price execution and delivery reliability will determine competitiveness.
For Canadian fintechs, the implications are direct. Canada consistently ranks among the world’s larger remittance markets, with strong outbound flows to Asia, Latin America, and Africa. If US based apps normalize faster push payments and cleaner fee disclosure, Canadian providers will face rising consumer expectations. Platforms serving newcomers, gig workers, and cross-border small businesses will need to match or exceed that standard.
Darren Wang, Founder and CEO, OwlTing Group:
“For too long, cross-border payments have burdened U.S. immigrants and freelancers supporting families abroad with high costs and slow speed.”
If Visa Direct powered remittance apps scale in the United States, will Canadian fintechs compete on speed, FX pricing transparency, corridor specialization, or integrated financial services?
Remittance economics are tightening. Card network push rails reduce settlement friction. Regulated banking partners add compliance credibility. Canadian operators that rely on slower correspondent banking flows may face margin compression if similar models expand north or partner locally.
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
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Feb 18, 2026 | NCFA Fintech Market Activity | Payments Infrastructure

On Feb 17 2026, Nuvei announced a partnership with Nautilus Plus to power omnichannel payments across its Quebec gym network and integrated digital platform, Ultime Fit.
The integration was completed in six weeks, a fraction of the typical six-month cycle for omnichannel payment rollouts. Nuvei’s modular payment infrastructure now handles point-of-sale, mobile, and online transactions in a unified flow, aligning billing, reconciliation, and member onboarding across the physical and digital experience.
Phil Fayer, Chair and CEO of Nuvei said the speed of delivery reflects a shared focus on improving member experiences.
"Delivering a fully omnichannel integration at this pace is extremely rare, and it shows what is possible when both teams are equally committed and aligned. We are proud to support a Canadian brand that brings real innovation and meaningful lifestyle change to the fitness community."
Martin Légaré, President and CEO at Nautilus Plus, added that seamless payments for both gym members and Ultime Fit users were essential for delivering a consistent experience.
For Nuvei, this engagement demonstrates practical enterprise payments impact in a sector where high volume and diversity of channels, such as in-person, subscription, and digital content, all demand consistent reconciliation and predictable cash flow and settlement times. Merchants that unify payment flows reduce operational friction and improve financial insights, which matters for weekly cash reporting and monthly accrual accounting.
Nuvei recently secured shareholder approval for its $6.3B Advent International buyout approval, reinforcing its transition into private ownership.
Unified omnichannel payment platforms reduce reconciliation complexity and can strengthen merchant economics. When fintech infrastructure providers deliver rapid, reliable integrations, what operational and competitive advantages can smaller verticals, like fitness and wellness, unlock compared with players on legacy payment stacks?
For fintech builders and operators, this partnership demonstrates how integrated payments can serve both physical and digital channels with a single platform, improving predictability and member experience without sacrificing controls.
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
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Feb 17, 2026 | NCFA Fintech Market Activity | AI and Developer Infrastructure

Freepik Two AI agents celbrating new years
On Feb 5 2026, OpenAI launched GPT 5.3 Codex and on the same day competitor Anthropic launched Claude Opus 4.6 both major updates that evolve AI assisted software development from helpful autocomplete towards longer running agent style work that can plan, review, and debug across real codebases.
OpenAI describes GPT 5.3 Codex as its most capable agentic coding model so far and says it runs 25% faster than the prior generation while combining stronger coding performance with improved reasoning for professional workflows. This update matters in practice because speed changes behaviour. When a model returns usable work faster, teams try more tasks, run tighter loops, and start trusting the agent with bigger pieces of the build.
Anthropic frames Opus 4.6 as an upgrade to its smartest model and says it improves planning, sustains agentic tasks for longer, operates more reliably in larger codebases, and gets better at code review and debugging so it catches its own mistakes. Anthropic also says Opus 4.6 includes a 1M token context window in beta, which points straight at the enterprise reality of sprawling repositories and long technical histories that never fit cleanly into small prompts.
Once AI coding agents start handling larger chunks of work, the bottleneck (read human programmers) changes from writing code to proving that the code is safe, compliant, and traceable. For fintechs and financial institutions, that means stronger SDLC controls, tighter review gates, clearer model use policies, and improved audit trails and incident response.
Development teams that treat agent output like a black box will create new operational risk. Teams that treat AI agents like a new developer class with strict controls can amplify delivery speed without losing accountability.
As AI coding agents mature, the competitive edge goes from model novelty to measurable enterprise output, reinforcing the ROI thesis around return on intelligence in finance. The winners will not be the teams that generate the most code. The winners will be the teams that ship faster while keeping controls intact, then turn that delivery speed into better products, lower operating cost, and tighter feedback loops with customers.
With every new update and release, every dev tool vendor and cloud provider deepens their own agent workflows, raising pricing pressure, and the fight for default placement inside IDEs, repos, CI pipelines, and enterprise procurement. If your stack standardizes on one agent layer, switching later will feel like migrating a core platform, not swapping a plugin.
For Canadian fintechs weighing build versus buy, the question isn't whether to use coding agents. The question is how to build an operating model around them. Practical guidance on building enterprise AI agents can help teams decide what stays in house, what stays vendor managed, and what governance needs to exist before agents touch regulated codepaths.
AI coding agents continue to get more capable and are becoming embedded in more real workflows. When your team adopts one as a daily builder, what controls will you require so you can move faster without weakening security, testing discipline, and auditability?
For fintech builders, the near term edge comes from shipping faster while keeping standards high, and from choosing an AI developer stack that doesn't trap you with a single vendor later.
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
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Feb 10, 2026 | NCFA Fintech Market Activity | Alternative Finance and Capital Markets

On February 10 2026, UK POP rules go live, removing the old prospectus trigger that made large public raises expensive, slow, and out of reach for many private companies.
For years, UK companies faced a hard line. If a business raised more than €8 million in securities from the public in a year, it had to produce a full prospectus (NB: the UK retained that euro-denominated threshold in its domestic framework post-brexit). Crowdcube says that prospectus costs could cost more than £250,000 and take months, which pushed many companies away from public community rounds even when demand existed.
Under the Public Offer Platform regime, raises above £5 million now run through a regulated POP, and the regime removes the upper fundraising cap for those offers (No more funding caps). Raises under £5 million remain outside the POP requirement, but regulated execution and investor protection expectations still apply.
Platforms now carry more responsibility for diligence, disclosure quality, and investor safeguards. That shifts the burden from a giant issuer document to a supervised platform process that can move faster.
The UK is not alone. In the United States, Crowdfund Capital Advisors submitted a $20M Reg CF petition asking the SEC to raise the Regulation Crowdfunding cap from $5M to $20M. In Europe, the European Digital Finance Association are pushing to increase the ECSP threshold from €5m to €12m.
After years of advocating, Canada finally harmonized nationally its startup-crowdfunding exemption in 2021, but regulators have kept the issuer cap conservative. Under National Instrument 45 110, eligible issuers can raise up to $1.5m in a 12 month period, which a growing company can quickly outgrow and end up soon looking for more funding via heavier paths for larger rounds. If the government wants to prioritize funding scape-ups, they should take another look at increasing equity crowdfunding caps in Canada to be in line with global peers.
This funding cap tension isn't new. In fact NCFA has been advocating for the OSC and CSA to raise issuer funding caps for years. In 2017 for example, NCFA petitioned to raise caps to modernize equity crowdfunding in Ontario. In 2019, $5m cap formed part of NCFA's recommendations to reduce regulatory burden and unlock growth capital. Again in 2020, during national harmonization discussions, NCFA advocated to modernize NI 45 110 including increasing caps to $5 million so the framework could match real funding needs in a digital economy.
Now with the UK FCA removing prospectus triggers and the US and EU push for higher caps, there may be a new policy window for Canada's equity crowdfunding participants to petition yet again. If other jurisdictions support $10m to $20m community rounds under platform oversight, Canada needs to decide whether it wants founders scaling here or structuring growth capital elsewhere.
A higher ceiling, including a path toward $5m and beyond, would better match growth stage reality while keeping platform level investor protection front and centre. The global direction of travel now strengthens the case for a renewed Canadian push grounded in data, experience, and competitiveness.
If regulated platforms can run larger public offers without a prospectus wall in the UK, what should Canada do next, raise the ceiling, create a platform lane for larger rounds, or keep the cap and accept that growth capital routes around Canada?
One practical takeaway stands out. POP style rules treat the platform as the compliance spine, not the issuer. That design can cut cost and time while still demanding clear disclosures, suitability controls, and due diligence at the point of sale. While Canada doesn't necessarily need to copy the UK, it does need a credible path for larger community rounds that doesn't force founders into a prospectus sized bill before they have the scale to absorb 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
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February 17 2026 | Equity Crowdfunding and Retail Investors

Image: Freepik/pressfoto
On February 16 2026, multiple UK reports say BrewDog has hired advisers to explore a potential sale after years of losses and slower growth. As a result, about 220,000 Equity for Punks retail shareholders may lose money depending on deal structure and payout priority.
Do you remember the Equity for Punks BrewDog story from years past? It was a story of community empowerment in the early days of the equity crowdfunding movement. NCFA and established partners like Crowdfund Insider tracked that momentum, such as when when BrewDog plans a $50M US equity crowdfunding round. The story today however offers practical lessons about capital structure, liquidity, and investor protection.
BrewDog built one of the most visible equity crowdfunding programs in the world through Equity for Punks. The model gave everyday consumers direct exposure to private company ownership and it proved that brand and community could mobilize serious capital.
In 2017 however, BrewDog took a major private equity investment from TSG Consumer Partners. Reporting in The Guardian describes preferential rights that sit ahead of common shareholders in a sale. That structure now drives the risk for small shareholders in the current sale process, based on how the deal structure affects what retail shareholders receive in a sale. The core point is simple. Structure governs outcomes in private markets.
Phil Halsey (47) invested about £2,500, starting in the second cash call in 2011:
“It’s extremely disappointing that it’s gone this way,” said Halsey. “The last time you could have done some form of cashing out was about a year and a half ago.”
1. Capital stack always decides the payout. Retail investors often focus on brand, traction, and growth narrative. Professional investors focus first on the capital stack. If a preferred investor holds liquidation preferences or other senior rights, that investor receives sale proceeds first. Common shareholders receive what remains. In a strong exit everyone wins. In a weaker exit, common shareholders may receive little or nothing. Investors should read share class terms and understand exactly where they sit before they invest.
2. Liquidity risk shows up at the worst time. Equity crowdfunding expands access, but it rarely guarantees a clean exit path. If investors rely on one big liquidity event, timing risk becomes real. Investors should treat these positions as long duration holdings. Founders and platforms should design credible liquidity pathways where rules allow, because trust grows when investors understand how they can eventually exit.
3. Growth narratives do not replace unit economics. The sale process follows years where BrewDog reported losses. When costs rise and category growth cools, expansion heavier models feel pressure quickly. Investors should challenge founders and operators on the road to profitability, not just the top line story. Founders should align growth with durable margins, because narrative alone doesn't protect valuation.
4. Community builds momentum but it does not hedge downside. Equity for Punks turns customers into owners and it proves that community capital can scale a consumer brand. That impact remains real. Yet community alignment does not override contractual rights in a sale. Retail investors should value perks and participation for what they are, and they should separate those benefits from expected financial return.
BrewDog's case encourages retail investors to have more mature conversations about disclosure, investor education, and deal structure literacy. For Canada, the case reinforces why clear explanations of share classes, payout priority, and realistic liquidity expectations are important for investor protection and long term market credibility.
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
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