Canadian SaaS platforms have spent years moving deeper into their customers’ financial workflows, but lending is harder to pull off.
Scott Elliot, Slate
“When platforms send customers elsewhere for financial products, they’re leaving both value and revenue on the table.”
Outside of a handful of platforms with the scale or balance sheets to support it, building lending directly into a product demands teams, infrastructure, and capital that most growing software firms simply don’t have.
This problem is familiar territory for Scott Elliot, CEO and co-founder of Vancouver-based Slate, and his co-founder and CTO Devin Picciolini. The American duo previously worked on building lending products for Canada, and saw firsthand how difficult it was for software platforms to offer credit without taking on bank-level complexity.
“We were building lending products before Slate, and it was incredibly hard,” Elliot said. “You have to have an underwriting team, a compliance team. It’s a huge operation. But when platforms send customers elsewhere for financial products, they’re leaving both value and revenue on the table.”
Slate officially launched out of stealth last month, positioning itself to take advantage of Canada’s slow-moving open banking rollout, a fresh round of funding, and what its founders see as growing demand for more modern underwriting tools.
Before starting Slate in late 2025, Elliot had spent more than a decade in risk, compliance, and underwriting, starting at Goldman Sachs before moving to FinTech roles at Brex, Airwallex, and eventually Keep, a Canadian corporate card and banking platform.
For his part, Piccolini came up through product, first at Meta, where he worked on internal tooling and Instagram creator products, then as a founder, launching and exiting startups across accounting and healthcare.
Elliot and Picciolini met while working at Keep, where Picciolini was leading product and data initiatives, and Elliot was responsible for underwriting and compliance. Together, they helped build lending infrastructure inside the company, which gave them a front-row view of what it takes to offer credit responsibly in Canada.
“Even if you are a FinTech, it is incredibly hard to get lending off the ground,” Elliot said. “However, there are all these platforms, especially in Canada, that want to offer lending to their customers or financial products to their customers.”
In the United States, embedded lending is a mature ecosystem, according to Elliot. Platforms can plug into existing infrastructure, underwrite against real-time data, and deploy capital quickly.
“When we tried to apply that playbook in Canada, it definitely did not work,” Picciolini said. “Canada is significantly different when it comes to regulation and compliance.”
So, the pair built Slate to work off the rich, real-time financial data that SaaS platforms already generate and use every day. Payroll systems, point-of-sale software, e-commerce tools, and vertical SaaS products often know far more about a business’s health than a static bank statement.
“Banks today in Canada are unable to underwrite effectively against all the modern data and all these platforms,” Picciolini added. “The Canadian economy is literally held back from productive capacity because they’re simply unable to underwrite against anything besides bank data.”
Slate’s B2B2B technology lets platforms use their data to offer credit natively, instead of sending customers elsewhere to apply for loans. Slate handles the underwriting, compliance, and capital behind the scenes.
Businesses can integrate Slate through a low-code option, a more involved onboarding tier, or a full API. One of the company’s early design partners is Huumans, an AI-powered CFO platform for small businesses. Within that product, eligible customers can see a credit offer instantly, accept it, and receive funds without leaving the platform. “They went from being a payroll company to having capital embedded in their product within a week,” Picciolini said.
“There’s about to be a major shift with open banking laws coming to Canada. The customer’s banking data will belong to the customer and not the bank.”
Scott Elliot, Slate
“As a platform already embedded in how SMBs operate day to day, they’re well positioned to offer financial products in a way that feels native rather than bolted on,” Elliot added.
Backed by a recent $1.3-million CAD pre-seed financing round led by N49P and North Exit Ventures, Slate supplies lending capital directly, which spares platforms from putting loans on their own balance sheets. “One of our core benefits here is we’re bringing the capital to provide, because that’s a big blocker for a lot of people,” Elliot added.
Slate is coming out of stealth at a moment when Canadian financial regulation is starting to catch up with how FinTech businesses actually operate. Open banking legislation, which is rolling out in phases, will give consumers control over their banking data and open the door to more secure, standardized data access to third parties, like FinTech companies.
“There’s about to be a major shift with open banking laws coming to Canada,” Elliot said. “The customer’s banking data will belong to the customer and not the bank.”
Today, much of that data access relies on screen scraping, which has been criticized as a risky but necessary bridge for FinTech companies, and which the federal government recently proposed banning in its 2025 Budget. Open banking would replace that with live, permissioned connections, and for Slate, that strengthens the approach to underwriting its founders hope to take.
“We built underwriting models that rely less on the banking data and use all this auxiliary data that already lives in the platforms,” Elliot said.
However, Elliot doesn’t think of Slate as a replacement for banks. “Our key focus is serving Canadian small businesses through the platforms they already use,” he added.
The startup is in active discussions with multiple Canadian SaaS and Fintech companies and plans to expand partnerships over the coming year. “We want Canada to catch up with where tech’s at in the United States, and I think we’re giving them the ability to do that,” Picciolini said.
“We really want to power the next generation of Canadian platforms to offer financial services directly to their customers,” Elliot said. “So, instead of having to go to the banks, you can get financing where you already operate your business every day.”
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Image courtesy Slate.