Venn: Finally, a Modern Banking Platform for Canadian Businesses
Historically in Canada, the “Big Five” legacy banks – RBC, TD, Bank of Montreal, Bank of Nova Scotia, and CIBC – have controlled over 90% of the market. With no consistent innovation, their products have become antiquated, making it increasingly complex for modern Canadian businesses to transact and conduct vital business all in the same place. This includes everything from not being CAD and USD friendly to accept money, send money, pay invoices, and do currency exchange. Companies that do cross-border business are stuck paying for constant FX and wire fees, and run up against friction around sending EFTs, e-Transfers, and wires. These costs end up being substantial (3% of transaction volume), and Canadian businesses haven’t had a seamless solution to handle money movement.
We were shocked to learn that there has been no great multi-player mode for a head of finance to run an account they do not own, and how drastically the legacy offerings lacked sophisticated functionality around multi-currency transactions, account accessibility, and permissions for payment approvals in accounting and expense management. These inefficiencies have resulted in no single-source-of-truth platform that connects nicely across financial software, including Quickbooks. Customers have had no choice but to layer numerous costly solutions that cause data consistency issues and make reconciliation even harder.
That is until Venn – a full-modern neo-bank payments platform for Canadian small and medium businesses. All in one easy to use destination, Venn’s offerings span multi-currency accounts, currency exchange, corporate cards, investments, global bank transfers (AP), invoice payments, expense management, expense approval workflows, automated accounting, and accounts payables. Venn is the first and best solution for SMBs to manage their USD accounts for Canadian companies and act as a full-suite solution for their banking and finance needs. Perhaps most importantly, they have built a complete core banking system and their own ledger to own the Canadian customer experience and build with their customers’ needs top of mind.
Venn founders Ahmed Shafik and Saud Aziz come from a special N of 1 cohort at British neobank Revolut responsible for standing up the company internationally in North America and Canada. Their Revolut experience gives them an edge across product velocity, regulatory risk and compliance, and expertise in end-to-end deployment. Furthermore, many of Venn’s first 9 employees were also ex-Revolut, speaking highly of Venn’s gravitas, momentum, and the team's culture.
Venn has a unique opportunity to become the default Canadian banking solution for SMBs, and deliver a world-class banking experience that the sleepy Canadian traditional bank incumbents cannot provide – all while layering on full payment management functionality and owning all expense workflows.
We couldn’t be more excited to participate in their $15M ($21.5M CAD) Series A alongside Left Lane Capital,Intact Ventures and Gradient. This capital will go toward scaling their product offerings and to build out distribution at scale so they soon become the one core banking platform for Canadian SMBs who have deserved better for a long time.
