Rebuilding Business Banking for Canadian Entrepreneurs
Meet Saud Aziz — Co-founder of Venn!
Hey, it’s Alex!
This week, we’re featuring Saud Aziz, the co-founder of Venn, a business banking platform helping Canadian companies manage their finances — from collecting funds to paying vendors across borders.
We got into why “fake it till you make it” doesn’t work in fintech, how Saud and his co-founder went from cold emails to $25M raised, and why customer feedback — not investors or competitors — drives most of their roadmap.
If you’re building in a regulated space, or just trying to grow without throwing headcount at every problem, you’ll get a lot out of this one.
Dive in below!
Venn Quick Stats…
💼 Headcount: 11
⏳ Time in Business: 3.5 Years
💰 Money Raised: $25 Million
👥 Users: 4,000+
📈 Best Growth Channel: Word of Mouth
📅 Sales Cycle: 2–4 Weeks
✅ Conversion Rate from Demos: 65%
Background…
Venn helps Canadian business owners better manage their finances and replace their existing bank.
‘Finances’ means different things to different businesses, but for us, that means we help businesses collect funds more easily.
We provide them accounts in multiple currencies…
We make it easier for them to pay their vendors, whether they're in Canada or abroad.
We also support invoicing, corporate cards, currency exchange, and accounting software integrations.
The bigger goal is to replace the patchwork of tools businesses rely on with one unified platform.
Before Venn…
I studied finance in school, and right after graduating, got on a traditional path. I went into consulting, which was a really good learning experience, but after about nine months, I was pretty miserable.
I had always been very passionate about fintech, even in school, so I decided to take a leap of faith.
I quit consulting, joined this up-and-coming startup called KOHO. They had five employees, and hadn't raised much funding at that point.
My first role was actually in customer support. I had sent a cold email to the founder, and he told me that was the only opening they had. The way I saw it: it couldn’t be worse than what I was doing at the time, so I took it.
I stayed there for a couple of years. Towards the end, I was looking after payments inbound, outbound cost — all that kind of stuff. Then, I ended up joining a European Challenger bank called Revolut.
It was a scale up company and they wanted to expand into the Canadian market so I joined to lead that expansion. For those that aren’t familiar with it, Revolut is based in London but they're super popular across Europe. It's a fintech super app, so it covers consumer banking, business banking, trading, investing, all that kind of stuff.
Revolut is also where I met my co-founder, Ahmed. He was the second hire, right after me, and we worked on building and launching this thing in Canada. Ultimately, the timing wasn't right, and Canada didn't work out, so decided to wind down the Canadian expansion and focus on the US.
Honestly, I wasn't super motivated or excited by making the US better when I felt like we were so far behind here. So, I ended up joining an early stage payments company that had big ambitions for Canada. But within a couple of months, Ahmed and I just kept talking about how the impact that we could have in Canada could be so much bigger.
By then, consumer banking was starting to get more popular — but no one was really tackling businesses. And my parents are small business owners, Ahmed's parents are small business owners. Seeing what was out there, and knowing that it was all pretty terrible, we decided to build a better solution.
The first 12 months…
We raised money right away, because bootstrapping wasn’t really an option.
Then we had to create the actual infrastructure, so we hired a couple of engineers, and they built it.
All in all, it took us about 12 months before we could do our first transaction. Part of that was because we wanted to take a fundamentally different approach from other companies.
There's a lot of barriers in Canada to getting access to the payment rails. Things are moving in the right direction, but we wanted to make sure that we owned the most important and core aspects of our product before anything else.
Some other folks might end up using a third party to help with some of the payments infrastructure. The problem with that is now you no longer own your roadmap, and totally rely on them.
On early fundraising mistakes…
I think we made just about every mistake.
It was the first time either of us had ever fundraised.
And when we were doing it, it was the second half of 2021 — Fintech was red hot.
Every investor loved it.
Every other week there was a headline about a FinTech company raising 10 million dollars.
Given the climate, we went in thinking that it would be super easy.
We didn’t know what we were doing, so we were like, let's create a pitch deck and just message a bunch of people being like ‘you should give us money’.
That didn't work at all.
We probably spent three months trying to fundraise and we were very unsuccessful.
We were just so confused, because we were seeing other people doing it, and we knew that there was such a big opportunity for a product like ours in Canada. The market might be smaller, but Canada doesn't really have much competition.
So, after turning up nothing, we took a step back, and spoke with other folks. Ultimately, we realized that just like many other things — fundraising is a sales process.
I had never done sales before, so I was learning from the ground up. Like the idea of a CRM would be super familiar to any account executive, but it wasn’t to me.
When you're fundraising, you should have a CRM. You should be staggering your reach outs. You should try to organize folks by priority and reach out to your lowest priority first, and get some reps in, and make sure you're hearing what the objections are and then making sure you're addressing those objections in your more important pitches.
I think there’s a ton of great advice out there…
Looking back, if we used Reddit or read some stuff from Y Combinator, we probably could have saved two months.
But it was good to learn the hard way.
Why faking it doesn’t work in fintech…
‘Fake it till you make it’ doesn't really work in banking, and I’ll explain why.
Initially, our thinking was: People are holding their most important asset with us, they're going to be trusting us to receive their revenue, pay their vendors, all that sort of stuff, so we should be presenting ourselves as a very established, large corporation, one that's been around for decades.
The problem with that is: business owners are smart, and they'll see right through that. We realized that it was better to just be candid and really play on our strengths, so we decided to just be ourselves, and it resonated with a lot of people.
That’s one of the biggest things that I hear today. People are like, I love your videos, I love your content, and I would have never expected it. Meanwhile, we were just shooting in the office, knowing they were terrible, but they were real, so we thought, why not put it out, and see what the response is?
The other way to frame it is: the best way to earn trust is for someone to get to know you on a personal level. Everyone that's in one of those videos is on our team, and I think getting to see the people behind the company makes it more real, and that realness earns trust.
Letting feedback shape the roadmap…
The entire point there is just play on your strengths. You're always going to be competing with someone that has 100 times the employees you do, or 1000 times more money than you.
Accessibility and speed is super important in terms of customer feedback. It is one of the main things that has gotten us where we are today. One of my favorite features within the product is someone can go in (if they're signed in) and click on their name in the bottom left. There's a little button that says ‘leave feedback’ and you can upload images, videos — you can write whatever you want.
As soon as someone hits submit, it creates an alert in our customer feedback slack channel and it creates a ticket on our product board.
When we think about product feedback and customer feedback and roadmap planning, I would say about 70 to 80% of what we build comes directly from customer feedback. It is probably the biggest gift that we have today — that customers are willing to actually share their thoughts.
I think it's super important to make sure your customers know that you are accessible, that they can reach you and that you genuinely want them to share this kind of information, because it's been super helpful for us.
The other reason why it's very important is because when we started this, it was to solve our own problems. I had worked and managed business banking accounts for other companies and I knew all of my own personal pain points.
We made sure to solve all of those selfishly when we first launched the product, but after that, you need to know everyone else's pain points. There are a couple conventional ways of finding it: you can go on a customer tour, you can reach out to a lot of folks, but we had to figure out a way to get it at scale.
Finding the right bank partners…
In fintech in Canada, you're either a bank or you're not a bank. And we're in the non-bank category. What that essentially means is: if you want to offer any regulated activity, things like holding funds, issuing credit cards, you have to work with a licensed bank.
Unfortunately, here in Canada, we don't actually have too many banks to begin with, and then there are even fewer banks that actually want to work with fintech companies.
We work with People's Trust, we work with Community Federal Savings bank — quite a few because we offer multiple currencies and that sort of stuff.
The most important thing that we have to pitch to the banking partner is potential and opportunity. Why this is super important for them to prioritize is because they can get business elsewhere, they can go direct to consumer, and they can go direct to business. So the story that we're telling them is we're going to make sure that you're the bank that's on the bleeding edge. You are one of the most innovative, you're going to be powering the next generation of companies.
In practice, our relationship with them is that we're effectively allowed to open accounts on behalf of them. So when you sign up with Venn, we'll open you a Canadian dollar account with our Canadian banking partner, we'll open you a US dollar account with your US banking partner (and so on and so forth) so that you get international banking in one platform.
And — we'll make sure that the whole thing is the smoothest experience for you, whether it's onboarding, actually making payments, creating cards, any of that kind of stuff. At every point in time, the funds are always held securely with license-regulated, insured banks.
Because there's only three or four big banks in Canada, there is massive demand to access them and they can be very selective in who they work with.
Keep in mind: these are older, more established organizations, so they don't move at startup speed.
I don't think we ever had a moment where we weren't going to be able to get a banking partner.
Where we really faced the most difficulty was pitching the idea, because it’s an unprecedented product in a business that’s very traditional.
Offering multi-currency cards?
Concepts like that just didn't exist in banking, so really getting them to understand what it is, why it's important, and ultimately to buy into our vision was the most challenging part.
The difference between founder vs. employee…
There are no more fail safes. Everything stops with you.
There's no decision that you can outsource or deflect, and every decision that you make is not only going to have an impact on you, but it's also going to have an impact on the lives of everyone that is within the company.
It's a pretty big responsibility, and I take that seriously. We have folks on the team that have families and children. Because of that, I know firsthand that this business that we're building is providing for much more than just us.
I think the other thing that surprised me was that there's so much more admin work that you need to do when you don't have supporting functions, and it's always going to be much harder than you thought.
I definitely think we need more entrepreneurs in Canada, but I also think it's a disservice to not give people the full picture of what entrepreneurship is. It's extremely tough. However tough you think it's going to be, it's probably going to be tougher.
Defining roles and picking a co-founder…
We were pretty fortunate to have worked together for four years before starting this.
Our skill set is a little bit more similar than dissimilar and I think that's pretty unique, because typically, the co-founder relationship in our industry is usually non technical paired with technical.
Neither of us have an engineering background, so we fit in with the former. Still, I would say that's actually made things a little bit easier, because we're on the same wavelength with most things.
One thing that we did specifically that I don't think others did: before we started, we wrote down all of the possible departments that exist in a massive organization: Finance, operations, product, tech, HR, sales, customer support, all that sort of stuff.
After that, we both went away, and we each put our names on the different departments, depending on who we thought best to lead it. Then we compared notes to really see who should be owning what function. It was really good to see where we conflicted and where we agreed, and I think that has been one of the most effective things for deciphering who the ultimate decision maker is in a given area.
I understand why people don't do it, because it is a little bit awkward, especially because you eventually have to address the elephant in the room — who's going to be the CEO. But we did that early on and it was incredibly effective.
The importance of founder-led sales…
I'm going to give ourselves a little bit of credit.
Both of us are good at getting good and a lot of it is just through trial and experimentation.
In terms of getting our first 500 customers? That was just pure, brute force.
Messaging just about everyone that we know, asking them to refer it to their network.
Cold emailing, cold calling — all that sort of stuff.
Basically, we learned how to do a lot of these things from scratch.
Some people might recommend that you should just hire someone that's done it before, but I'm a strong believer in that you should at least understand how to do something successfully for your business before you outsource it to someone else.
We didn't hire our first salesperson until one of us had a really good grasp on how to sell the product.
Similarly on marketing, until we know what sort of messaging resonates, or what our best channel is, we're not going to outsource the most important parts of our business.
If you try to compete using the same methods that others are using, you're going to lose, because they usually have more time, more money, and they have a head start. You should just play to your strengths, and that starts with knowing what you can do that's different.
For me, it was founder-led sales.
It’s common, but it's still not as common as it should be.
Until you get your first million or 2 million in revenue, you should try to be doing as much selling as you can on your own.
Venn’s target audience…
We're best for most businesses that have a headcount of 250 or less. We tend to target businesses in the 50 to 250 range, but we are the best account for a brand new business as well.
Why are we best for them? When I think about a business's finances, you can simplify it a lot. There's money coming in and there's money going out. How do they need to solve that? They might be invoicing a customer. They might want to receive funds via Interac e-Transfer. They might need to receive a wire. Do we solve all those use cases? Can we help businesses receive money cheaply, efficiently and easily? Yes.
Why would a business need money to go out of their account? They need to pay a vendor. They have some expenses, taxes, whatever it might be. Can we help them with all of those use cases? 100%.
I think you can distill down the use case of business banking for most companies up to 250 headcount with just those two variables. That's why we're the best suited. When you go a little past 250 there's probably a third bucket that we don't quite solve yet.
Making money without the markup…
I'll start on the revenue side and then I'll talk about how we're able to price more effectively than others.
Revenue — We have a software subscription, so that's recurring revenue. The other share of our revenue is more variable in nature. One is interchange revenue, so anytime you make a purchase on a credit card, whichever one of the big five that card belongs to, the merchant pays them a percentage of the transaction value. It's a fee for helping facilitate the transaction.
Because we offer corporate cards to our customers, that card is technically ours. So the merchant, when they're paying that percentage, it's revenue for us. We share that revenue because we give our customers cash back. But that’s another source for us.
We offer a currency exchange. So we take the real exchange rate — the rates that the banks would be buying and selling currencies amongst each other — and then we add a small fee to that. For context, banks typically charge 2 to 3% — we charge 0.25 to 0.45%.
Then we charge fees for certain types of transfers, but we only charge fees for outbound transfers.
This is actually one of my biggest pet peeves: It makes zero sense that a bank would charge you to receive money, but they do. We incur a cost as well, but it just doesn't make sense to me to pass that cost forward to customers.
So those are the main sources of revenue for us.
In terms of how we're able to price more effectively: I think it’s more of a macro thing. Canadian banks are some of — if not the — most profitable banks anywhere in any country. The costs that we incur are probably 5 to 10 times what the banks are paying because fintech and banking is an economy of scale business.
They have much more volume than us, so their costs are much lower. However, their margin is much higher and their overhead is exponentially higher than us.
People honestly don't believe when I tell them this, but we’re a team of 11 people. That's our headcount versus the big five, so they have a lot more overhead from their larger headcount and there’s even more overhead from legacy systems and poor technology.
It all ties back to playing on your strengths. Because we have a super small team, we have super low overhead and we're getting those economies of scale. As we grow, our costs come down and we pass those savings to our customers.
Scaling with intention…
One of the metrics that I track most closely is revenue per employee, so as long as the business is growing and we're scaling and there's a payback, it makes sense to continue to grow and scale, but we need to be really mindful of that ratio.
We’re not going to be 11 people for much longer. We've already made some offers to some other folks, but in a broader sense, it’s all about being the right size for your stage and knowing what the business actually needs.
It’s a very easy trap to get into — thinking of headcount as solving problems. You need to think about the problem you’re facing first, and how to solve it from first principles.
If it's go-to-market, is your go-to-market efficient?
What are your metrics? Instead of hiring another salesperson, what is your conversion from demo to closed/won?
Can you drive that up first?
Do you think you've juiced that number as much as you can?
If so, then maybe it's time to bring on another hire.
Things like that…
I track our demo to closed/won pretty closely — and it's above 60% — so I think that's a very good percentage to bring on more folks.
I don't really think there's any benchmarks, but I honestly think that each person should be paying for themselves, if not more — otherwise you’re just burning VC money.
On hiring…
We're a team of 11 people.
We're very successful, we've raised a decent amount of funding, but we all work incredibly hard.
I think every single person on the team truly feels like an owner and is acting and operating as an owner.
Finding folks that are ready to sign up for something like this has been tough, and it takes us longer to hire because I want to make sure that when we do hire, we're bringing on the right person.
Finding folks who truly believe in what we’re doing has been challenging, and it ties back to another pet peeve of mine.
I don't think success is celebrated enough — and as loudly as it should be — in Canada. Because of that, there's a lot of folks, especially the younger generation, that think, what's the point of going above and beyond? There isn’t as clear of a link between hard work and achievement.
Looking back, it was extremely beneficial to work at Revolut. I think the company made something like 100 millionaires based on equity, and it also had one of the most intense work cultures. And intensity doesn't mean butts and seats. People were there because they wanted to be there. They believed in what they were doing, and they knew that the effort and impact that they were having not only helped the company, but helped themselves as well.
Lessons learned…
If I were to go back and do things a little bit differently, I’d sign customers up as early as possible, and sign up as many as possible — just do whatever we could to put it in their hands as soon as we could.
Don’t get me wrong, even with all the mistakes we made, we still grew incredibly quickly. I think it took us 10 months to get a million in revenue. But if we had done some of that stuff, maybe we could have done it in five months.
There were a lot of things that we tried in the first six months when we launched.
Stuff that was incredibly unsuccessful.
That being said, something that's really important to me is: don't write things off just because they didn't work. Realize that it only means it didn't work at that time.
When we got our first 500 customers, cold email didn't work. Phone calls didn't work, either.
Now, we get a lot of our customers through those channels.
On the flip side, don't be complacent with what's working today, because there's no guarantee it's going to work tomorrow, either.
Betting on a new wave of Canadian entrepreneurs…
I think there are endless opportunities if people are ready to step up and go after them.
I also think there's a generational shift happening and I'm extremely bullish on it.
I speak with a lot of business owners, and I think there's more and more folks starting side projects now and turning those into businesses.
In the next five years, I expect the number of new businesses created to be some percentage much higher than what it is today.
That’s it for this issue!
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If you, or someone you know would like to be featured, or just want to connect, feel free to message me on LinkedIn, or, if you’re building a business of your own and need some support, we should chat!
Interview by: Alex Tribe
Edited by: Angus Merry