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Paystone CEO's bold goal: To become London's first $1B business

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Tarique Al-Ansari has a message for London’s business community: It’s time to be bold.

The chief executive of Paystone, a business that develops technology for the financial services sector, has a bold vision of where he wants to take the business.

“I don’t want Paystone to be a small London company. We have a vision to go across Canada. We want to be this region’s tech unicorn, to be London’s first billion-dollar company, a national business like Shopify,” Al-Ansari said.

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Formerly known as Zomaron, the Wonderland Road business creates software used in the financial services sector, specifically the technology that operates debit and credit card machines, e-commerce and loyalty and gift card programs as well.

It has secured $69 million in financing and Al-Ansari hopes to grow the business internationally, and expand more aggressively into customer engagement, such as online reviews, and increase social media profile, he said.

“In London, we’re not bold enough,” he said. The company has a “very aggressive growth strategy” that has received a boost from the COVID-19 pandemic creating demand for online digital payments, Al-Ansari said.

Boasting about 25,000 customers and processing more than $6 billion in payment transactions a year, Paystone also offers e-commerce software for businesses to sell online and even payment plans for customers buying from large retailers, like furniture stores.

“Merchants are looking for ways to engage with customers and our software helps them,” Al-Ansari said.

He called the $69 million in financing – combining a loan from National Bank and a first-for-London investment by the Canadian Business Growth Fund – “a milestone” for London.

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“This is fuel for our growth, to invest in our future. It’s about enhancing the product and offering customer support.”

The company ranked 84th on The Globe and Mail’s 2020 list of Canada’s 400 top-growing companies and 61st on Canadian Business’s 2020 GROWTH500 list.

“Paystone’s organic growth trajectory is impressive and supported by an ambitious acquisition strategy,” said George Rossolatos, chief executive of the growth fund.

There is no other business in London doing the work Paystone is and securing such level of investment, said Kapil Lakhotia, chief executive of the London Economic Development Corp.

“It’s fantastic to see a London company get this capital injection. Raising money for investment is a major challenge to business growth so it’s great to see a London business on the radar for investment,” he said.

“Fintech (financial technology) is a growth area in the tech sector. It’s great London has a business seeing this type of growth.”

Aggressive growth is not new to Paystone or Al-Ansari. He has bought four financial technology businesses in the last 18 months in Montreal, Alberta, British Columbia and Ontario. Those acquisitions have helped Paystone grow sales more than five-fold in the last two years to more than $50 million a year, he said.

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“The more acquisitions we go after, the more customers, the larger our market share,” Al-Ansari said. “Digital tools enhance customer experience. We create a growth engine for sales.”

Paystone employs about 60 people in London and another 40 in offices across Canada. It began life as Zomaron in 2009 and when it acquired more businesses and expanded its offerings, became Paystone in 2019.

“We didn’t just rebrand, Paystone absorbed Zomaron,” Al-Ansari said. “We’re just scratching the surface. We have a ways to go, we have way more growth potential. We could be 10 times bigger.”

ndebono@postmedia.com

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