As domestic payments processors vanish, Helcim wraps self in the Maple Leaf, raises $53-million

When two Canadian banks sold payments processor Moneris Solutions Corp. to a U.S. buyer for $2-billion last week, one of its last domestic rivals, Helcim Inc., warned the deal could compromise this country’s data sovereignty and infrastructure for moving money.

That same warning also serves as a sales pitch for Calgary-based Helcim. It benefited last year when Toronto-Dominion Bank sold its payments processing unit to Milwaukee-based Fiserv, Inc. That led to “a huge influx of business,” Helcim chief executive officer Nicolas Beique said in an interview. Domestic merchants reacted “very strongly” to reduced Canadian options.

Now, with the pending sale of Moneris by Royal Bank of Canada and Bank of Montreal to Francisco Partners, “everybody is realizing there are few Canadian options left,” he said. “I think it will accelerate our growth.” Other processors serving the market include foreign vendors Stripe, Square and Adyen and Canada’s Shopify Inc. and Nuvei Corp.

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With Canadian corporate sovereignty in fashion, Helcim has also wrapped itself in the Maple Leaf with its latest financing. Helcim is set to announce Friday that Business Development Bank of Canada’s (BDC) growth venture unit has led a $53-million equity financing, valuing the company at $250-million including funds raised. That’s up from a $97-million valuation when Helcim last raised venture capital in 2024 in a deal led by San Francisco VC firm Headline.

Other investors in the latest round include Curql, a fintech investment fund backed by North American credit unions, as well as Los Angeles-based Gold House Ventures.

“We actually wanted Canadian money into this round with everything that’s happening,” Mr. Beique said. “We think it’s a great advantage and we felt that a Canadian-led investor would understand that advantage better.”

Helcim, founded 20 years ago, switched from being a reseller of payments services for U.S. Bank in 2020 to developing its own offering. Helcim’s pitch is that it offers a cheaper, more transparent alternative to other payments providers.

Today the 200-person company offers in-person payments processing and invoicing services to 22,000 main-street small businesses in Canada and the U.S. Annualized revenues of $150-million are up 70 per cent year-over-year, and Helcim is adding 2,000 locations monthly, Mr. Beique said.

Geneviève Bouthillier, executive vice-president with BDC’s private capital arm, said Helcim “is creating options” for small businesses and “will be a global winner and a Canadian champion.”

But Helcim’s Canada-friendly approach has its limits. Its growth has accelerated after it launched a new service in January that has proven to be a bit of an elbows-up affront to dozens of vertical market software vendors, including Canadian-based Clio, Jane and Jobber.

The new product is an agentic browser extension that acts as a workaround to payments processors embedded in programs used by customers to run their businesses. Employees click on the extension, which runs commands to automatically pull data from the software into Helcim and process payments on handheld machines at the front desk.

Helcim claims its fees are lower than those charged by the software companies, which use integrated third-party processors like Stripe. Mr. Beique said more than 1,000 customers have installed Helcim’s extension.

Three new Helcim customers told The Globe and Mail they each saved hundreds of dollars a month after adopting its extension. “Switching to Helcim has made a meaningful difference for my small practice and allowed me to retain more of the revenue I work hard to earn,” said Jennifer Lopez, who operates a dermatology clinic in Lake Wylie, S.C. She previously used Fiserv, embedded within her OptiMantra electronic medical record system, to charge clients.

Some software companies are not happy with Helcim, Mr. Beique said. Payments and other embedded financial offerings have been a big source of revenues for them. And other upstarts are coming to market with similar payments offerings.

Ms. Lopez and another medical services clinic operator customer in Toronto said their software providers had not made it easy for them to migrate client payment information to Helcim, forcing them to collect it anew.

And Mr. Beique said some vendors have “tried to modify their software to block us. Ultimately, we’re challenging their walled garden and what they thought was a monopoly play for their payment revenue. And we’re saying, ‘No, we have a right to compete. Merchants have a right to choice.’”

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Jobber CEO Sam Pillar said in an interview, “I’m not aware of a single customer” using Helcim to replace Jobber’s payments offering. “For Jobber, it’s a nothing burger.”

Alison Taylor, co-CEO of Jane, said in an e-mail, “Competition is good for small businesses, and we respect anyone building payments products in Canada.”

She said Jane’s payments offering is “built into the workflows that support insurance billing, remote patient payments, automatic billing and reconciliation – not just the moment money moves. Synching with a terminal is only one of Jane’s many payment features, and while there are standalone solutions for a variety of the tools Jane offers, the magic is in how Jane considers the whole practice.”

Mr. Beique said, “As a Canadian founder, you want to make everybody happy,” but “ultimately, if that means we’re going to step on toes and not be able to make friends with everyone, I think we’ve come to terms with that.”