What the business is
Online banking platform for Canadian SMBs: multi-currency accounts, FX, corporate cards, spend management and accounting integrations
Starting capital
US$3.7M seed co-led by Gradient Ventures and Fin Capital, closed in 2022, with The Fintech Fund, Exponent Capital and Thirdbase Capital; angels include founders and executives of PayPal, Google Pay, Affirm, BNY Mellon, Airbnb, Coinbase, Revolut and Robinhood
How it started
Saud Aziz and Ahmed Shafik, who had worked at sunday, Revolut and Koho, grew up watching their small-business-owner parents struggle with Canadian banking. They founded Vault in Toronto in late 2021 and spent the first year building card-transfer and account infrastructure, banking-partner diligence and compliance programs from scratch.
What happened
A pilot with about 25 companies grew to hundreds per month, with users from two to 100 employees. The product offers local accounts in CAD, USD, GBP and EUR, an exchange Vault claims is 10x cheaper than big banks, a multi-currency Mastercard with 1% cashback, free domestic and international transfers to 180 countries, GICs earning up to 5.00%, and accounting integrations. Revenue comes from interchange and transaction fees.
What has to be true
Five big banks left Canadian SMB banking antiquated: branch-dependent processes and high fees, per the founders
Existing options were point solutions — TransferWise for transfers, credit unions for cards and loans — with no full stack
Founders watched their own small-business-owner parents struggle with daily banking operations
US rivals never crossed the border, leaving a Mercury-shaped hole in a market with heavy cross-border needs
What can be applied
When a market lags its neighbour by years, the product playbook is already proven — the real work is rebuilding the local fintech plumbing everyone else got to rent.
Aftermath
As of the June 2023 launch Vault planned to add lending, savings products, payment automation and more complex FX products later that year, having just cleared its first year of building infrastructure and compliance from scratch.
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