The hardest part of scaling a fintech is usually invisible. It shows up after the product works and before the next contract closes.
It’s the moment founders realize the market they built for may not be big enough to support the growth they’re aiming for.
Even adding in a smattering of online-only banks like EQ and Neo Financial, plus several smaller regional banks and credit unions, the concentration is measurable.
Canada’s Big Banks hold more than 90% of the market, a structure that even Royal Bank of Canada chief executive Dave McKay has described as a “ruthless oligopoly” in a 2024 Globe & Mail article.
Atlantic Canada’s fintechs have figured out how to build and even scale.
The most recent numbers from Atlantic Fintech, an organization supporting fintech growth across the four Atlantic provinces, point to over 150 fintechs calling the East Coast home. The region produces strong products and founders who know what they’re doing (including, famously, one Unicorn).
Atlantic Canada can build fintech. Scaling it, especially at speed, often means grabbing your passport.
“You can create innovation anywhere,” says Winston Morton, CEO of Halifax-based Climative. “But the customers aren’t here really for fintech, so you’re going to spend a lot of time on an airplane.”
Launched by Atlantic Fintech in late 2025, the Atlantic Fintech Growth Network is designed to help fintechs from the region overcome common barriers to expansion, while also positioning Atlantic Canada as a hub for sector innovation.
In this first cohort, the Growth Network is focused on the U.S., giving selected fintechs direct access to regulatory guidance, market intelligence, and U.S. executives and investors.
“Expanding fintech innovation internationally requires not only market knowledge but also strong strategic partnerships and regulatory insight,” says Charles Potts, advisor at the National Fintech Organization and former EVP and chief innovation officer of the Independent Community Bankers of America.
He sees this approach as a way to grow and support innovation that works for the local ecosystem and the broader financial sector.
The Growth Network is amplifying what’s already there a strong base of regional fintech innovation) instead of simply opening the door to a new market.
But there’s a bigger question we can ask first.
Why are there so many fintechs in Atlantic Canada in the first place?
The East Coast didn’t wake up one morning and decide to sprout so many fintechs.
The roots are more practical than that, and according to Alicia Roisman Ismach, head of fintech at Atlantic Fintech, they’re two-fold.
First, in the 90s and 2000s, the region (especially New Brunswick) was a hub for call centres.
In the 90s, as David Campbell, author of the recent book Toward Prosperity and Substack’s It’s the Economy, Stupid!, explains, an influx of grads from the area’s universities and colleges needed to leave to find work.
To address this ‘brain drain,’ then-Premier Frank McKenna worked with business leaders to bring support services jobs to the Maritimes.
At its height in 2006, Campbell says in his book, the business, building, and support services sector of the region employed almost 70,000, and became a key sector for a region that needed the jobs.
[Author’s note: It really was a booming sector. I’m a born-and-raised New Brunswicker, and my mom definitely bugged me *multiple* times to get a job in one of the many call centres in Moncton during my university summer vacations in the early 2000s. “Just as long as it’s one of the in-bound ones,” she would always say. Sage advice, Mom. And in case you’re wondering, I worked at Zellers instead.]
And those weren’t just headset-and-script jobs. Many handled operations for banks, telecom companies, healthcare billing systems, and payment providers.
“It’s all about money movement, payments, and billing, and everything that has to do with FinTech,” Roiseman Ismach says.
Naturally, innovation is going to come out of this environment.
It’s like Atlantic Canada built the plumbing of the fintech house before it was even branded as fintech.
“They didn’t know they were fintechs, but they were,” she adds.
Add to that a wave of newcomers who arrived with experience in markets that moved faster, with different regulations and systems.
“They are seeing gaps in what [happens] here compared to what they had in their countries in terms of solutions,” she says.
The result is a region with operational depth, technical capability, and founders who know how systems work.
While it’s a great place to develop a product, it’s not automatically a place to scale one.
The U.S. is not just bigger. It’s built differently.
For Atlantic fintechs, the pull of the States is structural.
“Just across the border, sometimes a few hours driving, and you are in a country with 10 times the population,” Roisman Ismach says. “So of course, it’s a market that no one wants to miss.”
With thousands of banks, there are simply more doors to knock on in the U.S.
As analyst John Aiken notes in the Financial Post, alternative players only need a “microscopic share” of what the biggest banks have to be “wildly successful.”
That concentration also changes what success looks like.
“When you look at how Canada is built, the regulations that we have, the compliance that’s needed, the players you can work with, sometimes it’s easier to sell elsewhere,” says Mischka Jacobs, head of community at Atlantic Fintech.
Morton is familiar with these differences.
“Canada tends to be a little bit more regulated, and not everything that happens in Canada is directly translatable in the U.S.,” Morton says. “We’ve had to experiment with how we present our products and services there.”
The conversation changes, too.
“We don’t talk much about saving the planet in the U.S.,” Morton says. “We talk about how the banks can make more money, and the climate is a co-benefit of those programs.”
This calibration is baked into the Growth Network, with its access to key experts and executives, allowing participating fintechs mentorship in specific nuances of business culture in the U.S.
“You really need to get a sense of the landscape to do the language,” Morton adds.
Scaling is a network problem, not a talent problem
Access and visibility are keys to success for the innovation sector, not just those in Atlantic Canada.
But it’s the not-located-in-a-hub-region-like-Ontario of it all that makes that visibility a little trickier.
“Not unlike Canada, [the U.S.] is very relationship driven,” Morton says. “We’re getting advice on where to show up and who to show up with, because these are, when it comes right down to it, personal networks.”
Who vouches for you, who takes your call, and who introduces you into the room, all matter. It doesn’t matter where you are or what business you’re in. If you’re trying to scale, networks like Atlantic Fintech are invaluable.
“Once you’re out selling, you have to be plugged into as many networks as possible,” Morton says.
“What used to be an ecosystem of fintech startups is now an ecosystem of more mature companies who are ready to export to international markets,” Jacobs says.
The challenge now is making sure the ones that exist can compete without relocating, slowing down, or spending half their lives in airport lounges.
“It’s about positioning these companies as leaders there, so they can take a significant share of the market for the segments they are selling to,” adds Roisman Ismach.
Atlantic Canada has shown it can build fintech companies inside a concentrated, highly regulated national system.
Even nationally, change is unfolding gradually. As Neo Financial co-founder Jeff Adamson put it to the Financial Post, disruption in Canadian banking is “an evolution and not a revolution.”
Canada’s banking system may still look like a six toddlers in a trench coat. The Can Atlantic fintechs build enough connections abroad to grow beyond its limits.
Final shots
- In a banking system one chief executive called a “ruthless oligopoly,” disruption rarely arrives overnight. It advances through relationships, regulation, and persistence.
- Real scale for fintechs often requires stepping into bigger arenas.
- Atlantic Canada has built the plumbing and the products. The next phase belongs to companies that can plug into power without pulling up stakes.
