Four fintech companies. A digital adoption platform, a behavioral AI engine, an accounting data API, and a card issuing stack. Different products every time. Same buyer every time — the person at a bank or credit union who decides what technology to buy. The hard part was never the product. It was the procurement committee.
Click the card to flip it
into financial institutions
The Work
Not self-serve.
Not a 30-day trial.
The deals I run take 6 to 18 months. They require navigating procurement, risk committees, core banking integrations, and regulation — before anyone asks about price. This isn't product-led growth. It's relationship-led, process-heavy, and very specific to financial institutions.
I've done it across four fintech companies, always selling into the same buyer. The edge is knowing how FIs buy — not just what they buy.
Transactions
Transaction history.
Verified by the network.
Full-stack card issuing platform — credit, debit, prepaid, commercial — sold into banks, credit unions, fintechs, and brands. Full deal cycle from prospect to live cards: RFP responses, program economics, procurement and risk committees. 7+ FI clients signed including Manulife, Affinity CU, Canadian Western Bank, Zolve, Air France KLM, Laurentian Bank, PayFacto. Built and managed a multi-million dollar pipeline across Canada and the US. Backed by Mastercard for US market expansion.
The work requires understanding the stack as well as the buyer does. Canadian side: RPAA, Payments Canada, open banking. US side: BIN sponsorship, CCCA, community bank landscape. The deals that stall in "we'll revisit next quarter" almost never had a real champion. The ones that close always did.
Accounting data infrastructure — normalized API connecting FIs to QuickBooks, Xero, Sage, NetSuite for real-time SMB financials and faster lending decisions. Built the commercial side targeting lenders and fintechs. Short stint — FIS acquired Railz while I was there (now FIS Accounting Data as a Service). Validated the thesis: the infrastructure layer under fintech is where the real value gets captured.
Behavioral banking AI for credit unions and community banks — digital engagement, financial wellness, product adoption. Gartner Cool Vendor in Banking 2019. Flagship: Desjardins, the largest credit union in North America. Joined just before COVID. When the pandemic hit, FIs suddenly needed to reach members at scale with proactive guidance — exactly what the platform did.
Stood up pilots with Desjardins and other major credit unions, landed field trials for use cases nobody had on a roadmap before March 2020. Nothing compresses a sales cycle like genuine urgency. I learned more about selling to credit unions in 2020 than the two years before it.
Digital learning and adoption platform for banks and credit unions — game-based, mobile-first, purpose-built for FIs. This is where it started. Joined when the commercial side was being built from scratch. Two years figuring out exactly how financial institutions buy software — procurement, budget approval, who decides, what gets a deal across the line versus stuck forever.
Joined with one client. Left with twelve. Every sales motion I've run since is a version of something I learned here. The buyer hasn't changed. Just the product.
Started inside financial institutions before ever selling into them. Citi, Co-operators, Ecclesiastical Insurance. Learned how they work — the budget cycles, the risk appetite, the internal politics, the way decisions actually get made when nobody from a vendor is in the room.
This is why I understand how FIs buy. I sat in those meetings. I filled out those procurement questionnaires. I was the person deciding whether to take the next vendor call or let it go to voicemail. That perspective doesn't show up on a spec sheet, but it closes deals.
Rewards
Rewards earned.
Compounding since 2017.
Ranked Brim's Credit-Card-as-a-Service best-in-class for product capabilities in global CCaaS analysis. Consumer and business card capabilities both evaluated. I was part of the analyst engagement process.
Recognized for reducing card program complexity and launch times. Speed-to-market — weeks not years — positioned as the central value proposition in analyst and industry narratives.
Brim ranked #8 (2,904% growth) in 2022 and #20 (1,028% growth) in 2023 on Deloitte Fast 50 Canada. Also #138 on Fast 500 North America. Revenue growth at this scale doesn't happen without a pipeline behind it.
Helped position exagens for Gartner's Cool Vendor recognition in 2019. Behavioral banking AI for credit unions — Desjardins as flagship. The Gartner mention opened FI doors that wouldn't have taken a meeting otherwise. Analyst recognition is a sales tool.
Brim named to CB Insights Fintech 100 — the 100 most promising private fintech companies globally. Market positioning, deal velocity, and competitive differentiation all factor into selection.
Brim added to Communitech's Team True North — 26 Canadian tech companies identified as on a path to $1B in annual revenue. Based on growth trajectory and market positioning in their core vertical.
Card Specs
Technical specs.
Read the fine print.
The full spec sheet. Terms and conditions apply. Mostly the terms.
Playbook
What I tell founders.
Before they learn the hard way.
What I've learned selling into financial institutions over a decade. The fine print that actually matters. Some of it might save you 18 months.
Mentoring
Giving back.
Teaching what took a decade.
Most early-stage fintech founders have never sold software to a bank. They know their product. They have strong opinions about the market. And they are completely unprepared for the moment a procurement committee asks for a 6-month-old SOC 2 and a data handling policy covering EU data residency for a product that doesn't operate in Europe.
My job is to compress 18 months of lessons into a few conversations.
Four fintech companies. Different products every time — learning platforms, behavioral AI, accounting data, card issuing. The buyer is the same person in every one of those deals. Head of digital. VP of product. Chief digital officer. Same budget cycle, same risk committee, same procurement questionnaire.
Once you understand how FIs buy, everything else is product knowledge. And product knowledge is easier to acquire than a decade of FI procurement experience.
I work with founders who already have a few clients and need the motion to become repeatable. The ones who move fastest stop treating procurement as an obstacle and start treating it as a competitive advantage — because most of their competitors won't.
This entire site — the 3D card, the circuit board, the terminal, the Easter eggs — was built through iterative conversation with Claude Code. No templates. No framework. No front-end developer.
I was early to LinkedIn for BD. Early to marketing automation. Early to AI tooling. The instinct is always the same: find the leverage before the market prices it in.
From the Field
Not just logos.
Stories behind them.
Viewpoint
Things I think about.
And 24,000 people seem to agree.
Signal
What I'm watching right now.
Not a newsletter.
RPAA supervision is now live. Most payment service providers I talk to still haven't registered. The Bank of Canada isn't sending reminders — they're building an enforcement framework. If you process payments in Canada and you're not thinking about this, start.
The Big 5 have their processors locked in. Regional banks are mid-cycle. But ~4,500 US community banks are still running legacy card programs with limited digital capabilities. The ones ready to switch are looking for speed-to-market and modern APIs — not a 3-year migration.
RFP responses that took 3 weeks now take 3 days. Competitive intel that required an analyst is now a prompt away. The BD people who treat AI as a research intern are pulling ahead. The ones waiting for "the right tool" are already behind.
What I Build
I ship things.
Not just sell them.
Built a fintech job board because hiring in this space is broken. AI-rewritten job listings, warm intros built in. The tool I wished existed when I was looking.
fintechcommons.com →Built with Claude Code. One HTML file, zero frameworks, zero images, ~2,000 lines. The 3D card, the circuit board, the Easter eggs — all conversation, no code written by hand. The site is the portfolio.
tariquekhan.ca →Canadian fintech WhatsApp community. Not a newsletter. Not a Discord with three active members and twelve bots. Real practitioners sharing what's actually happening.
Learn more →— the group chat.
A WhatsApp community for Canadian fintech practitioners. Not a newsletter. Not a 4,000-person Discord with three active members and twelve bots. People who work in the space, sharing what's actually happening — and occasionally complaining about the RTR timeline.
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