Two Calgary companies devoted to helping the financial lives of Canadians are among four selected for Innovate Financial Health’s inaugural cohort.

Innovate Financial Health is a national non-profit founded in 2018 to support the creation and scaling of innovative products and services that improve the financial lives of Canadians. It is supporting four Canadian tech startups. Each will receive $25,000 in grant funding to help build and scale solutions.

The four startups will also receive access to a roster of 70+ mentors and curriculum support.

The four ventures selected to participate in the three-month program are:

  • AltruWisdom (Calgary): An online subscription-based financial education platform to help Canadians make informed life decisions.
  • PolicyMe (Toronto): A platform for customers to get smart and honest life insurance advice in five minutes.
  • Quber (Moncton): A financial app developed out of Moncton that provides people with easy and fun solutions to help them get control of their money.
  • ZayZoon (Calgary): A HR tech company that provides employees access to wages on-demand and personal financial management tools to better their financial health. 

Tate Hackert, President of ZayZoon, said the company was formed in 2014, but “we really went at it in earnest in 2016.”

“Our growth has been pretty tremendous. Right now in the United States we’re available to a little more than three million employees by way over 120,000 businesses. We’ve got some pretty big franchises on board of big brand companies. For example, we have over 100 Domino’s on our platform now,” said Hackert.

“It’s really quite empowering to us as a Calgary-based fintech to be doing business on an international scale and I think it’s very empowering for our employees as well being able to put a name or a face to what they’re doing – to the work that they’re putting into this.

“As we look to the future we definitely want to keep expanding our company and executing our mission of improving employee health by way of responsible financial products. But we also want to do good on Calgary and we expect to grow our employee base tremendously over the next couple of years . . . We want to continue expanding our financial ecosystem and ultimately create a financial concierge or a one-stop financial shop for employees to better get a grip on their finances.”

IFH said more than 40 ventures from across Canada applied for the inaugural program.

The IFH Impact Accelerator is funded by Capital One. Innovate Financial Health’s other funders and partners include JP Morgan Chase, Prosper Canada, and Social Capital Partners.

Mario Toneguzzi is a business reporter in Calgary.

© Calgary’s Business


Fintech financial health solutionsThe views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.