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That one conversation with a TD investor at a meetup in Toronto changed how I see funding
I was at the FintechTO meetup last month and got talking to a guy who works in their innovation lab. He basically said most startups pitch their product but forget to show how they handle fraud at scale, which is apparently a huge deal for banks. Has anyone else found that tailoring your pitch to specific risk metrics actually opens doors with the big Canadian banks?
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fiona9851mo ago
Look, I'm going to push back on this a bit. I was at a similar meetup in Vancouver last spring and talked to a BMO guy who said the exact opposite. He told me most banks actually care way more about how fast you can sign up users and how sticky your product is, not your fraud tech. They outsource security to their own systems anyway. If you focus too hard on risk metrics in your pitch, you sound like a compliance nerd instead of a growth machine. I've seen three fintechs get funded by RBC and Scotiabank in the last year, and none of them led with fraud numbers. They showed crazy user adoption and a clear exit plan. So is this TD guy just trying to scare people away from competition, or does each bank really have a totally different pet peeve?
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jamie7701mo ago
Holy crap, wait. Fraud at scale? That's actually kind of a game changer. I totally assumed banks cared most about user growth or revenue projections. But now that he says it, it makes perfect sense. They're the ones who eat the losses when a startup's system gets gamed. I bet most fintechs just breeze past security details in their pitch decks and wonder why they get ghosted by the big guys. That's probably the whole reason they keep getting stuck in pilot purgatory.
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Fiona's BMO guy probably just likes hearing about hockey stick growth graphs.
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