Financial technologies and mobile applications are increasingly used in the Canadian banking sector to provide digital services across the country. Almost everywhere: Quebec rules restrict this sector more strictly and slow down its deployment across the province.
These rules affect the protection of consumers vis-à-vis credit companies. Quebec is the region of North America where this framework is the most strict, notes Rasha Katabi, founder of the Toronto company Brim Financial. “The bar is certainly higher to enter Quebec than elsewhere in Canada or even the United States,” she said. However, this framework did not prevent his company from complying with provincial financial services requirements to offer its service in both languages and from coast to coast.
“Quebec is a fairly large market, and we want to be there, like everywhere else in Canada,” she says. Brim Financial is the first, and only, company of its kind to be able to issue a Mastercard credit card to authorized users in less than three minutes and integrate it immediately into their Apple digital wallet. Owners of an Apple product can therefore pay for online or in-store purchases through a contactless payment terminal. A version for Google’s Android devices is currently in development and will be released later.
Instant credit
Brim offers three versions of its fully digital Mastercard, all of which feature a loyalty and rebate program tailored to the user’s financial situation. This loyalty program is also unique in its kind: interested merchants can sign up in just a few minutes and offer products that their customers can buy with the points they accumulate using the Brim card.
“We wanted to offer a technological solution to traders who do not have or who do not want to develop technological expertise”, summarizes M.me Katabi. Already, Brim counts companies like Apple and Rona among its partners. A world-class airline and other Canadian and Quebec retailers will also be announced shortly.
“The pandemic has really accelerated the adoption of contactless payment, which has become a necessity for many consumers. Our new instant credit card service wants to take advantage of this rapid change, ”says Rasha Katabi.
We wanted to offer a technological solution to traders who do not have or who do not want to develop technological expertise
In the United States, this practice has already existed for several months. In fact, Apple has been offering its own credit card to its US customers for over a year, called the Apple Card. It offers more generous credit terms than traditional cards and encourages cardholders to buy Apple products, through a loyalty program designed for this purpose.
Mobile savings
Brim isn’t the only fintech (or ” fintech In the jargon) to try to impose itself on the mobile of Canadian consumers. Alberta-based Neo Financial became the first exclusively digital Canadian bank in the spring of 2021. With its application, Neo offers Canadian mobile users various financial services, and it also includes the issuance of a Mastercard credit card.
But it is above all the possibility of opening your own savings account that sets Neo apart. This is one of the factors that allowed it to complete, in mid-September, a financing phase of 64 million dollars, led by the American investor Peter Thiel, one of the most famous figures of the Californian Silicon Valley and a former investor in Facebook and PayPal, among others.
Unlike Brim, however, Neo Financial focuses its activities in Western Canada. However, the company says it relies on more than 4,000 partner merchants in its own loyalty program, which are spread across Canada.
Its most promising banking service, the savings account, is offered everywhere in Canada… except in Quebec. This does not prevent Neo Financial from promising that one day all of its services will be offered in the province, especially since the Calgary-based company intends to eventually expand its activities to all the products that it can be purchased by visiting a branch of a major Canadian bank.
In the meantime, Neo will use the freshly raised capital to improve its digital offering with a view to quickly establishing itself as “Canada’s digital financial services giant that will be used by millions of Canadians”, as a spokesperson summed up in a statement. of Valar Ventures, the venture capital firm headed by Peter Thiel.