10
Hot take: My old boss in Toronto said to ignore the big banks, and he was dead wrong
When I was starting my payments app, my former manager at a tech firm told me, 'Forget trying to work with the big five banks, they'll just crush you. Go direct to consumers.' So for almost a year, I built everything assuming we'd never get a banking partner. Then we tried pitching to a smaller credit union in Vancouver, and their first question was which major bank's rails we were using. We had nothing. It set us back months. That advice cost us real time and about $15,000 in rework to build integrations we should have had from day one. You can't just ignore the existing financial system here, even if you're a startup. The infrastructure is too baked in. Has anyone else had to pivot hard because they listened to bad advice about the Canadian banking landscape?
3 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In3 Comments
the_henry28d ago
How much did that bad advice cost you?
7
anthony12928d ago
Yeah, that part about the infrastructure being too baked in hits hard. I used to believe you could just build your own thing and ignore the banks. Then I tried to move money between accounts for a side project. The sheer amount of red tape and weird rules made it clear you're not building on fresh ground, you're plugging into an old, complicated system. It's like trying to add a new room to a house but finding out all the wiring goes through one main panel you don't own. You have to work with it.
3