Canadian Fintech: Moneris up for sale 🛍️

Good morning! Welcome back to the Canadian Fintech Newsletter, an industry roundup for founders, operators and investors that takes 3 minutes to read.

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💰 Funding

• Uno Platform, a Montreal based developer tool for building web, mobile and desktop apps raised $2.5m led by AQC Capital. The company powers several Canadian fintech apps.

• Cohere, a Toronto based AI LLM startup raised US $500m at a $6.8b valuation led by Radical Ventures and Inovia Capital.

🤝 M&A

• Dealers dealing dealers…

  • ATB Capital Markets is acquiring Cormark, a major Canadian mid-market independent investment bank.

  • Fort Capital Partners, another independent investment bank is acquiring Acquatio, an investment bank that focuses on selling wealth advisors.

• BMO & RBC are looking to sell Moneris for USD $2b.

  • The banks co-founded the payment processor 25 years ago. It does roughly 1/3 of all Canadian business transactions.

  • Last month TD sold off its merchant payments business to Fiserv.

• Circle, the issuer of the world’s 2nd most popular stablecoin USDC acquired IP and staff from Informal Systems, a Toronto based infrastructure company built for the Cosmos protocol.

  • Last week Ripple, another major crypto issuer also acquired a Toronto based blockchain infrastructure startup.

• Adauris, a Vancouver based tool that uses AI to detect buying signals, was acquired by Landbase, a platform that provides prospect research for sales teams.

  • This is their 2nd Canadian acquisition this year.

🚀 Product

• Wealthsimple crossed $84b in AUA. Up 94% from last year.

• Scotiabank is axing investment banking roles in Hong Kong, Australia and parts of the US.

• Chexy, a tool to pay for things with your credit card, now allows businesses to pay their corporate taxes.

• WonderFi reimbursed their CEO USD $500k for the crypto stolen from him during his kidnapping last year.

• Scotiabank now allows new Canadians to use their foreign credit bureau data in online credit card applications via Nova Credit.

⚖️ Policy

• Payments Canada announced that it will finally remove paper remittance exchanges at the end of 2026.

  • Paper remittance exchanges are when physical docs (like bill stubs or payment slips) are sent between banks to match a payment with the biller’s account, instead of sending the info electronically.

• Wealthsimple is pushing the federal government to limit “transfer out” fees levied on consumers who move their registered accounts to a different financial institution.

  • Earlier this year TD doubled their “transfer out” fees from $75 to $150, putting them in line with most other Canadian banks.

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Have a great week! See ya 👋

-Tal Schwartz