PAYMENTS

PayTic

Revolutionizing how financial institutions process payments

o most people, Casablanca and Prince Edward Island may seem like worlds apart, but for Moroccan native Imad Boumahdi, the locations share two key characteristics: Both are beautiful coastal seaports, and each has a vibrant fintech start-up ecosystem.

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“Prince Edward Island is a beautiful place to live and raise a family,” says Boumahdi, chief executive of PayTic. “While it’s very different from the hustle of Casablanca, it’s quite similar to the coastal cities of Morocco, so it feels like home. And I didn’t think I would, but I really enjoy the winter months, too—there is a joy and beauty to the winter here that’s underestimated.”

A decade ago, Boumahdi was working at the Casablanca office of Carta Worldwide, a Canadian digital payments company. As he advanced, he was first transferred to London and then offered the chance to work in the firm’s Charlottetown office, on Prince Edward Island. He loved his new location and his new job, so in 2018 he decided to immigrate and make Canada his new home. However, while onboarding major global banks to Carta’s platform, he noticed persistent problems: disparate data sources and formats as well as endless roadblocks to resolving payment-processing disputes.

Processing payments was dogged by reconciling arcane assets, from text-based files to PDFs, having to log on to various systems (core banking, Mastercard, Visa, etc.), and then collating various inputs into Excel. It was a process almost designed to attract human error. So in 2020, Boumahdi built his own fix: automating reconciliation and eliminating his own work nightmares. After working out the kinks, he showed his basic model to a few clients. Feedback was enthusiastic, prompting him to take the plunge and establish his own firm, PayTic.

Today, PayTic employs more than two dozen highly skilled workers and is well on its way to revolutionizing and simplifying how banks, credit unions, and other institutions process payments by getting rid of outdated ways of finding and fixing problems (“exceptions” in industry parlance). The firm uses artificial intelligence and other tools to automate manual tasks that otherwise can cost banks dearly in wasted time and effort.

Headquarters: Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island
Founded: 2020
No. of employees: 25+
Website: payticconnect.com

PayTic is part of a growing scene of startups in Canada’s Atlantic region. Fintech executives here say that what makes Atlantic different from other tech hubs is how a sense of community and supporting local businesses smooths the path to success.

In the case of PayTic, most of its early investors are from the region, and its first customer is local to Canada, too: Windsor Family Credit Union. Boumahdi knew WFCU from his time at Carta and asked the head of operations there if they could use any help.

As it happened, they wanted a simple charge-back module. Boumahdi and his PayTic team built the module and offered it to WFCU at a discount to secure their first paying customer. Three years later, WFCU is using all the firm’s service modules and advocates for the use of PayTic by other Canadian credit unions.

It’s no accident that highly educated, opportunity-seeking immigrants are relocating to Prince Edward Island and the Atlantic region, drawn by a welcoming immigration policy that encourages skilled workers to relocate to a region that not so long ago was stagnating demographically. The working-age population of Prince Edward Island had dropped to fewer than 98,000, aged 15 to 64 in 2011, as youth moved west for jobs and immigration was virtually nonexistent. Since then, Prince Edward Island has encouraged immigration and is now adding thousands of foreign workers annually. Now, the working-age population is forecast to reach almost 200,000 by 2062.

Indeed, after PayTic recently successfully secured several visas for potential immigrants from Morocco, Boumahdi says he was called by an immigration official who asked if the firm needed more visas to attract more highly skilled workers. “It's been great to build a company in Canada that supports the Canadian economy while knowing that the immigration authorities are supportive of more immigration to build our team,” says Boumahdi. “It really shows the global and welcoming Canadian spirit.” Today, PayTic has become truly global by moving up the value chain to develop relationships with issuers and partners that can white-label the firm’s offerings and roll it out to many more customers at once.