On March 4^th, This Week in Fintech had their debut event in Canada, bringing together hundreds of people across the tech ecosystem for an evening of networking, food and drinks, panels from local leaders, and even a magician working the crowd. We had nearly 500 people register when it was all said and done, showing the enthusiasm and depth of the Toronto tech ecosystem.

We don’t know how it took us this long to get to Canada, but we’re glad we did. This will be the first of many…

This episode is the recorded version of our panel featuring Rasha Katabi, Founder & CEO of Brim Financial.

In this panel, Rasha discusses Brim’s global product offerings across financial services, customer case studies with specific data on how they’ve helped their clients, how her team is leveraging AI across the org, and then leaves us with inspiring words on her optimism in the wake of geopolitical uncertainty.

🎧 Live from Toronto: Brim CEO Rasha Katabi on Scaling Credit Card Infrastructure + Adopting AI

Podcast Episode · This Week in Fintech’s Podcast · 03/14/2025 · 18m

Apple Podcasts

Brim is a leading fintech infrastructure company transforming the credit card platform and payment automation space. Brim's modular platform and highly scalable product suite fully empowers financial institutions, fintechs, and large international brands to run / evolve their product platforms to meet their customer and market needs. Brim Financial is one of the fastest growing enterprise technology companies, according to Deloitte's Technology Fast 50 in North America. Brim's Credit-Card-as-a-Service platform has been recognized as best-in-class for product capabilities by Aite-Novarica Group in their analysis of global CCaaS providers.

Ryan Zauk is the Host of the This Month in Fintech Podcast and Bay Area lead for the broader This Week in Fintech platform. In his day job, Ryan is an investor at OMERS Ventures, the direct investing arm of one of the world’s largest pension plans with over $130Bn in net assets. Prior to OMERS, he worked in Morgan Stanley’s Tech Investment Banking team focused on M&A and capital markets. He is based in the Bay Area.

You can find him on Linkedin or Twitter.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Ryan Zauk: The views expressed in this podcast are the speakers own and are not the views of this week, FinTech or any other person or entity. The content provided in this podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as legal, business tax, or investment advice or recommendation, solicitation endorsement, or offering by me or anyone else for the sale subscription or purchase of securities, or for investment advisory services of any kind.

Hello everyone and welcome to today's special edition of the This Month in FinTech podcast recorded live in Toronto on March 4th, this week in FinTech had their debut event in Canada bringing together hundreds of people across the tech ecosystem for an evening of networking, food and drinks, panels from local leaders and even a magician working the crowd.

We had nearly 500 people register when it was all said and done showing the enthusiasm and depth of the Toronto Tech ecosystem. We don't know how it took us this long to get to Canada, but we're glad we did. This will be the first of many. This episode is the recorded version of our panel featuring Rasha Kabi, founder and CEO of Brim Financial in this panel.

Rasha discusses brim's global product offerings across financial services, customer case studies with specific data on how they've helped their clients, how her team is leveraging AI across the organization, and then leaves us with some inspiring words on her optimism in the wake of geopolitical uncertainty.

Let's get started.

So let's jump in. Rasha, you had a really impressive long career on Wall Street, and then I think a lot of people, they make it to the Promised Land on Wall Street, they wanna ride out the md golden handcuffs, enjoy whatever spoils that leads to, and instead you jumped into the belly of the beast and started.

A FinTech company, one of probably the hardest companies out there to start. So I wanna understand, what was this founding origin story and why did you want to build Brim?

[00:01:55] Rasha Katabi: Okay. Well, you know, good, you, you started with the whole MD thing. I made md I was just about 30 years old. So I had a long tenure as MD and I ran seven businesses and I was the chair of the mortgage backed Securities Issuers Association here in Canada that had all the banks, all the insurance companies, et cetera, cross border between here and the us.

So with so much sort of already under your belt, because you know the lucky early start, if you will. Lucky or not, you know, you decide. But, but then you can do two big things in you, you know, one lifetime. And I thought, uh, you know, that's, uh, that's the time to do it. 'cause I didn't wanna look back one day and say, what if?

So it's that. And I encourage everyone to always compete against yourself first and foremost, and challenge yourself for the next step. And that's, that's key to the brim story. To the brim, DNA, you know.

[00:02:49] Rasha Katabi: to everything that we do.

[00:02:50] Ryan Zauk: And so for our, for our audience here that might not be familiar with Brim, what exactly does Brim do and what is the problems that it's solving?

[00:02:58] Rasha Katabi: So Brim is a payments and cards platform as a service. It is. End to end turnkey. It enables our customers who are fintechs or other banks, financial institutions, credit unions, to be able to launch, scale, grow, manage, configure their own suite of products, whether that is in payments or in cards, and really create the unique financial services, uh, that they wanna offer their clients.

So now who are their clients? Those could be small businesses, large multinational corporates, or they can also be their own retail customers. And so what Brim actually enables in a, in a way that, you know, we always thought is super important and you would say, this is, you know, something from my banking background.

You don't really just, you know. Launch a product like you would do just in Pure Tech, you would launch a phone, okay, you would launch a product. One thing in banking and in financial services, it is multifaceted by definition, so, so what we do at Brim, it is a turnkey that takes into account the entire multifacetedness of being able to launch.

Products that will thrive and grow because each one of them is super multifaceted. You know, why brim and, and, and not, uh, you know, uh, others. Because what makes us unique, and I would say probably globally, is that because we took that platform approach. Really from the very start and, and, and way before platform was even fashionable to, you know, to talk about platforms.

The early investors that I would encounter would tell me, you know, but what is your product? Oh, no, no, tell me your exact, you know, narrow vertical. And I would laugh at that, and I would say certainly you weren't, and you are never in banking because a, a, a small, narrow vertical will not work. So, um, so we launched platforms, which is a, which was a little bit against the grain.

Lo and behold, now it's the holy grail. And what that does is that it enables you as a company to grow and to scale quite efficiently because every new product that you launch is just embedded on that platform. So once you launch your platform with one of your bank customers or credit unions or fintechs, what you're doing is simply enable the next product if they want it or not, you know, configure to their own, uh, specifications or goals or et cetera.

Uh, so that's. So that's what we do, Ryan.

[00:05:34] Ryan Zauk: Awesome. And then maybe to bring it to life even more for some of our audience, can you give us maybe just a quick case study of a customer that you've worked with life before Brim, and then now that they're using your product?

[00:05:44] Rasha Katabi: Sure. And you know, lucky for us, we have many examples.

So let me give a few, you know, so we have, for example, I'm gonna take the example of a credit union. And this credit union had, for example, launched credit cards, you know, some for small business, some for, for, for, uh, retail customers. And they. Did not have the full scale, for example, of a Royal Bank, let's say, you know, to have their own large legacy processors and then large legacy end-to-end services because as we just said, it's not just a product, right?

It is multifaceted. So the solutions that are in the market, it doesn't take into account is that you need to have your entire team. So your staff in branches, in your call centers, in your credit, in your marketing, in your communication, in your product, all on the same page, trying to design the products and the experiences and the capabilities that they wanna launch, and be able to scale them and grow them and talk to their partners.

And it's all in real time. You're literally co-browsing with your customer, whatever channel. So true omnichannels, true embedded, et cetera. So those clients that where we actually did migrations from other legacy processors and ecosystem and services onto the Brim platform, we saw in one year. So within 12 months increases anywhere between 26% to 47% in one year.

So it literally blew out of the water there. Business case, the business case that they put together as a team to actually say, okay, this is why we wanna move. And, and, and lo and behold, you know, this is a repeated now experience. Every time we have a new client, we see the same thing. We become better because we learn so much along the way so that we can do the next one better and the next one better and et cetera.

And with all of that, really benefit our clients. And, you know, and, and even we, we certainly keep top of mind the folks that. Trusted us at the beginning of the journey and, and probably, you know, had a little bit more heartache with us because it was also the beginning of our journey. And then we now have all of the new products and capabilities and services that we simply roll out and enable with them, and then they see the strength of a platform.

From the perspective of our clients and, and what, you know, from their business case to like, sort of, you know, 12 months post, what they see is that they were able to come to market from, you know, that entire multifaceted, you know, capabilities that they're rolling out that would've taken. 10 times, 15 times the budget, five times to eight times the time to market, which is another piece of the budget.

And there's no real, you know, guarantee that this is all gonna work out well. And if you talk to like Visa and MasterCard and the networks who, you know, go and get busy signing up clients, you know, and giving them marketing funds and, and so many of those actually never launch a product. It's two years later.

It's three years later, it's four. Exactly. And I see some heads nodding. It's exactly that, and it's exactly that in the US and in Canada and in Europe and really everywhere else. Because, because this is, you know, the beginning of, yes, we wanna launch a business and even signing up contracts right, left and center, you've done nothing yet.

You know you're really still on the ground floor until you implement it and you launch it. You know, and that's a huge heavy undertaking. So, and I think this is what we do super well at Brim and we make it seamless and we roll it out either embedded in our clients' ecosystems, we have over 350 APIs. So for, so for those that, you know, wanna build their own front end experiences and whatnot and et cetera, and put the APIs in a different way together, you know, that's.

Absolutely there. Even the folks that actually take the embedded solutions and experiences, they're still all of these APIs and they can start with one and then five and then 10 and mix and match and you know, and put them within their banking journeys and experiences. So a lot of flexibility. Awesome.

[00:09:48] Ryan Zauk: And then with a lot of this product development, I know we talked about this earlier. I think it'd be remiss if we didn't talk about AI tonight. I do want to ask the big question. You mentioned that you're really trying to, uh, deploy AI all throughout your organization. Can you talk about a little bit for the audience as everybody's grappling with it, no matter the job that they're doing right now?

Yeah. Lessons learned how you're using it across Brim

[00:10:09] Rasha Katabi: for sure. So, and thanks for this question. We actually had our offsite last week, so we were all huddled together for, you know, Thursday and Friday, and that was a big sort of, you know, um, um, so. At Brim for many years now. Uh, we knew that that brim is going to be, you know, that heavy.

Of course, we have so much data from all of our customers and their customers and et cetera, so we were super. Careful, even without even knowing what we're gonna do with this data to organize it and clean it, and all of the relational, you know, you know, all of the relational links between all of our various, you know, tables and data and, and function and actions and next steps and et cetera, you know, have clearly been mapped and, and, and, um, database and et cetera.

So. So, and, and I think, you know, for the, for the folks that, uh, you know, are, you know, looking to implement ai, that's a huge part of, of, of the trouble. And, and luckily for us, we're sort of, you know, starting, you know, with, with a, with a, I would say, an unfair advantage. And so, and with that, we've taken every single process.

You know, I, I know every single process that happens in operations and in finance and in tech and in product and in communications. And we literally mapped it and we understand. We understand ourselves first and foremost. Uh, where do we have it automated? Where does it, where, where does it fail? If it does, where do we have to actually address it if we have to?

Who does what? And what are the processes that are the most time intensive? Because we all have them, and so we put them actually in reverse order. And we're now, I'm gonna say about 20% on, you know, on our journey we're gonna be, you know, when, when we sort of, I feel, you know, cross the threshold of, of about 30 and see really the results and you know, discuss them with our board.

We're gonna announce that because we're seeing massive operational. Lift. And you know, of course with, with margin improvements and whatnot, we're gonna be able to have that translate to all of our clients. You know, we're starting it with ourselves first, but you know, this is gonna translate to all of our clients, so, so, so massive profitability that is driven by operational gains.

[00:12:39] Ryan Zauk: Awesome. And then last question here before we open it up to audience q and a, you know the drill. Think about a question, find some courage, please ask Raha. Last question here would be remiss to also not mention. It's been a challenging couple months. Geopolitically economically, and a lot of other factors going on across the business landscape, north America and globally.

What keeps you very optimistic moving forward for Brim and the broader, broader Toronto ecosystem and global FinTech ecosystem? There's gotta be something

[00:13:10] Rasha Katabi: thinking. Thinking if there, okay, so I, you know, I think first and foremost. When you have a good product, like first and foremost my approach is, is control what you can control.

You know, and don't be distracted by the noise. There's always noise, okay? Noise comes and goes. Control what you can control and stay focused. If that means, turn off your notifications because seriously, the 10th time we, you hear about what Trump is saying or doing. You know, isn't gonna bring you a lot of marginal new news, you know, turn off notifications.

That's what I do, and I focus on what I'm gonna do and my information. I get it as a pull, not as a push. I. You know, I pull my information when I need it. I don't let anything get pushed on me. Uh, so that that's on how I deal with the noise and, and everything else. Why I am optimistic, I think because today, here in this, in this day, that is a tariff day.

We are all here focused on innovation, and we are all here focused on how we're building our companies and growing it for the future. That is really what drives my optimism, because at the end of it all, you have noise and then you have hard. Working extremely intelligent, extremely focused people, and that's the community we are in.

And that gives me a lot of optimism.

[00:14:30] Ryan Zauk: That's awesome. Thank you. And, uh, pause for that.

Thank you. Alright, we've got time for an

[00:14:39] Speaker 3: audience question here before we, uh, before we break. Hi. You have been doing a lot of interesting work in business and commercial payments and cards and one of the most important problems that. Commercial businesses find is getting credit. Right. Okay. Uh, there have been lot of banks and financial institutions looking at how they can do innovations around credit by putting cards and payments, uh, in integrated with them.

Has there been any innovation that you have been working around this?

[00:15:10] Rasha Katabi: So do you say access to credit? Or do you say working with credit? Like is it a loan and an installment and a card? All in one statement? With one payment? With with optimization. 'cause that's what we do. Okay.

[00:15:23] Speaker 3: That is exactly what is required because there is a lot of dearth of good credit to small and medium commercial businesses and there are innovations happening around the world where this thing is integrated with, uh.

The business and commercial cards are integrated with the, uh, uh, you know, access to credit. Access

[00:15:44] Rasha Katabi: to credit. Yeah. And, and, and that, that's a fair question. So we actually have. Had a lot of, you know, of course need. And so people coming to us, including by the way the fintechs and the banks, which is interesting enough, and the credit unions and whatnot, saying access to credit.

What do you have there? And we are now at a scale where funders and global funders that are interested in various types of credits are approaching us to say, Hey, you have so much of these types of customers that we would love to be able to extend credit to. So what we are looking to do may be potentially at Brim, is find an efficient way.

To, you know, through our platform we have, you know, funders that are really, you know, global and worldwide that wanna provide credit to our clients and then their clients that are on our platform. And since we have all of the technology and, you know, all of the data effectively at the end of the day through it all, that, that could potentially make it easier or more, you know, streamlined or more.

So, you know, we're gonna. We're gonna try because I think that there's a lot of demand for it, and we'll see where that takes us.

[00:16:57] Ryan Zauk: Awesome. And with that, let's give one more round of applause for Rasha. Yeah.

Thank you for listening to today's episode of the This Month in FinTech podcast. If you enjoyed today's episode, please like, follow, subscribe, or rate us across your preferred podcast and social media platforms. Lastly, I'd like to thank our editor Evangel Marco for his great work on our episodes.

Signing off. I'm your host, Ryan Zauk.