FINTECH AWARD PROPELS LOCAL STARTUPS, CEMENTING CALGARY AS A FINTECH HUB

BY RENNAY CRAATS

Alberta is a province of entrepreneurs and mavericks, and over the past several years they have cast their imaginations toward Calgary’s burgeoning tech industry to redefine what the city is all about. Fintech is emerging as a hot growth area in Calgary’s tech sector. Calgary-based fintech Digital Commerce Group of Companies (including Digital Commerce Bank) and Platform Calgary know that entrepreneurs need a little spark to ignite their big ideas. That spark came in the form of the Digital Commerce Calgary Fintech Award in 2022 as a way to showcase and support what innovative tech companies are developing as they enhance and optimize how consumers and companies interact with financial services.

“Having built and sold a successful international fintech business here in Calgary, my co-founder and I realized the tremendous benefits we enjoyed while building it. These same opportunities could benefit an emerging generation of entrepreneurs – and we felt the best way to do that would be to highlight Calgary and focus on shining a light on these new fintech businesses,” says Jeff Smith, co-founder and CEO of Digital Commerce Bank and sponsor of the Digital Commerce Calgary Fintech Award.

In the inaugural year, the program received applications from 45 fintech startup companies of which 24 were selected to take part in sessions and workshops from world-class industry advisors and mentors. The field was then narrowed to 11 finalists. These top startups attended workshops on topics from pitch coaching to regulations in fintech and business development before pitching to the panel of judges in hopes of being one of the two winners awarded cash prizes to help grow their businesses. Alice Reimer, CEO of Fillip Fleet won the $250,000 prize and Jonah Chininga, founder of Woveo (formerly called Miq) won the second-place prize of $60,000.

While Reimer was a tech entrepreneur prior to launching Fillip in January 2022, this is her first foray into the fintech space. Fillip, a digital wallet app, is the first digital payment platform built for businesses with fleets of vehicles, and it allows drivers to pay for gas and maintenance anywhere Visa is accepted using the app on their phones. Fillip allows fleet managers to track and control spending and receive real-time transaction notifications, and it is made easy by integrating with other business and fleet software.

Winning the Digital Commerce Calgary Fintech Award validated the hard work that had gone into launching the business and shone a light on these trailblazers transforming an industry. The cash prize opened Fillip up to more growth possibilities faster to push it to the next level.

“It created an opportunity for us to accelerate some of our growth, both in the work we were doing with marketing and adding some incremental headcount particularly around our sales and marketing team,” says Reimer. “Visa learned of our award and is a great partner of ours. They shared it amongst their networks and just that recognition and credibility of the work we’re doing as an emerging fintech startup was great.”

Chininga’s experiences as an international student in PEI got him thinking about the issues surrounding financial inclusion and he began to ponder how he could turn rotational savings, which has long been common practice in developing countries, into a digital process that could accommodate today’s complex population. The result is Woveo, a financial platform that produces community wallets that allow a group of people to pool and save funds while they access and build credit. Participating in the Digital Commerce Calgary Fintech Award program brought more than prize money; it provided incredible information, momentum and connections that will help him ultimately build a national footprint and grow the company as it prepares to go live in May.

“There’s great opportunity to be able to solve some of the most pressing problems within the fintech ecosystem. In Canada, there is a lot of immigration so adjusting our services to be able to cater to new Canadians coming into the system and into a high-inflation environment where the cost of living is really high, financial services are going to be key,” he says.

Chininga relocated to Calgary to be part of the incredible opportunities and support that is building throughout the city’s fintech community. Calgary was named one of the top 30 fintech hubs in North America in 2021, and the vibrant fintech ecosystem is attracting more talent and investment into the area. Platform Calgary is doing all it can to support emerging fintech companies like Woveo and Fillip. Its collaboration with Digital Commerce Group of Companies on the Digital Commerce Calgary Fintech Award is one of the ways the organization is supporting the growing tech sector in Calgary. Sponsorship opportunities are available for companies looking to be part of transforming Calgary into a global hub for innovation in fintech.

“If [fintech companies] start here and they scale here, they’ll succeed here and then they’ll stay here. And that, at the end of the day, is what we need to do across our tech and innovation sector as a whole,” says Reimer.

With global recognition and homegrown talent like Reimer and Chininga, the future of fintech is in Calgary.

Fintech startups looking to grow in Calgary can now apply to be part of the Digital Commerce Calgary Fintech Award and compete to win one of three cash prizes totaling $300K. Applications close June 5, 2023.

“We often think of tech companies needing deep technology backgrounds. We think that we need people to be able to program something amazing. But what we really need are different skill sets to sit around the table.

“So, what we do at Propra is bring together those different perspectives to engage with different problems. As a result, we’ve been open to folks coming with different experiences –and we’ve seen incredible success in doing so.”

It’s a sentiment that’s shared by many in Calgary’s tech community, which continues to cut its teeth within an increasingly competitive skilled labour market.

Kylie Woods, founder and executive director of Chic Geek, says she’s similarly seeing an on-the-ground perspective to companies hiring based on values over hard skills.

“EVEN THINGS LIKE NUMBER OF YEARS EXPERIENCE – SOME COMPANIES ARE EVEN REMOVING THAT ALTOGETHER AS THERE ARE SO MANY FOLKS PIVOTING. IT’S NOT ABOUT THE NUMBER OF YEARS EXPERIENCE. IT’S ABOUT WHAT VALUE DO YOU BRING, AND DO YOU BELIEVE IN THE WORK WE’RE DOING?” SAYS WOODS.

“We’re even seeing shifts in the way they write their job applications,” says Woods, whose nearly decade-old company focuses on building gender diversity in technology through career-pathing, events, services and partnerships.

“Even things like number of years experience – some companies are even removing that altogether as there are so many folks pivoting. It’s not about the number of years experience. It’s about what value do you bring, and do you believe in the work we’re doing?”

Many in the local tech space believe this dimensional approach to hiring is what’s putting Calgary on the talent map. In a 2022 report from CBRE titled Scoring Tech Talent, Calgary ranked 28th among the Top 50 North American markets for the second consecutive year.

The report, which ranked markets according to their competitive advantages and appeal to both employers and tech talent employees, noted there are over 40,600 tech workers in Calgary. That included more than 7,400 tech jobs being added from 2017 to 2021.

In addition, the report ranked Calgary placed fourth in terms of tech talent concentration.

Industry experts say it’s an encouraging start in reaching the finish line of tripling Calgary’s tech sector over the next 10 years – a goal set by tech and innovation accelerator Platform Calgary. Vanessa Gagnon, director of community at Platform Calgary, says she’s encouraged by the persistently strong demand for skilled workers from the nearly 1,000 tech-enabled companies currently in the city.

“There are so many companies that are actively hiring because they need people who can help grow the business today,” she says, pointing to IBM’s new Client Innovation Centre and RBC’s Innovation Hub as examples.

“And that’s where Calgary is lucky because we have a lot of skilled individuals, whether they’re coming from other sectors or they’re already part of the tech community. There’s a lot of opportunity here.”

In fact, a 2022 report by the Information and Communications Technology Council of Canada anticipates technology employment will pace the provincial labour market in the coming years.

Titled A Resilient Recovery: Alberta’s Digital-Led PostCOVID Future, the study’s authors report that, “the province’s digital economy remained resilient and thrived” even through the pandemic. Moving forward, they singled out financial technology, health tech, clean technology and agtech as the subsectors that will likely lead employment gains in the province.

For Woods, part of the solution to growing Calgary’s tech talent pool is encouraging those already within it –specifically, women in intermediate-level positions who she says are leaving tech careers at a much faster rate than their male counterparts.

“To add a little more context to that, we saw women’s enrollment in like computer science peak in the 1980s at around 37 per cent. Today, we’re at 19 per cent,” she says. Woods attributes high attrition numbers to women feeling underserved in supports to continue advancing their careers. In many cases, they didn’t see other women in leadership, so they cut ties instead of spinning their tires.

“So, we’ve come up with things like career pathing,” which matches mentors with mentees to provide women with real advice for navigating the tech industry.

Chic Geek also hosts several events throughout the year, including Connect Her, a women-in-tech summit earlier this year that brought together more than 250 women together for an evening of networking and learning. Woods notes more than 500 connections were made at the one-day event, which sold out in less than two weeks.

“We know that talent is the number one kind of successor to tech companies doing well,” says Woods. “And so, what we’re seeing in Calgary is some really great pockets and communities of diverse talent groups. Chic Geek is an example of one of those diverse talent networks.”