The client
iFinance Canada helps Canadians pay for healthcare-related costs through monthly payment plans, including Medicard for medical and wellness procedures and Petcard for veterinary care. Merchants and clinics offer the plans to their own customers. In April 2022, Iceberg Finance acquired iFinance Canada and gained access to the iFinance Pay platform, which issues virtual cards in real time for online and in-store purchases.
The problem
In lending, speed decides who wins the customer. iFinance needed to decide in minutes, pay merchants smoothly, and stay on the right side of regulators, without hiring a reviewer for every new partner.
A two-week wait
Credit applications went through manual review and a decision took about two weeks. That is a long time to wait when you need a medical, dental or vet bill sorted now.
A queue that grew with the business
Every decision needed a person, so more merchants meant more reviewers and longer waits.
Payments had to work everywhere
Customers needed to pay online and in store without a separate process for each, and merchants needed to be paid without friction.
Regulation and trust
Lending and payments bring anti-money-laundering and regulatory duties. Auditors and partners expect controls that run continuously, not just written policies.
What we built
A 5-minute application
We redesigned the experience around the customer and the merchant, and automated the decision. Application time fell from two weeks to five minutes.
Automated scoring and adjudication
Credit scoring and adjudication run inside the application. There is no review queue to wait in and no extra headcount per new merchant.
Virtual cards on demand
Approved customers get a virtual card issued in real time. Using Marqeta, funds are made available just in time at checkout, so the same platform works online and in store.
Automated installments
Loans from $500 to $40,000 are repaid in equal monthly installments over 12 months to 7 years. Collection and follow-up are automated, with Twilio handling customer messaging.
Compliance built in
We handled anti-money-laundering and payments regulation, added the controls, wrote the policies, and carried the platform through a SOC 2 Type 2 audit, which it cleared. Splunk gave the team the visibility auditors ask for.
One purchase, end to end
- 1
Apply
At the merchant or online, in about 5 minutes.
- 2
Decision
Automated scoring and adjudication. No review queue.
- 3
Virtual card
A card is issued on demand, in real time.
- 4
Pay
Funds arrive just in time at checkout, over the Mastercard network.
- 5
Repay
Equal monthly installments, collected automatically.
The product
Unsecured lending, repaid in equal monthly installments.
The stack
Frontend
Backend
Data and cloud
Credit and data
Identity
Payments
Messaging
Observability
Compliance
The result
- Decisions in 5 minutes, down from two weeks.
- Merchants grew 4x to more than 10,000, with year-over-year revenue growth of 20%.
- A platform that scaled without a review queue. Volume no longer depended on how many people could review applications.
- Independent proof of trust. The platform cleared a SOC 2 Type 2 audit.
- A path to acquisition. iFinance Pay went from concept to an acquisition by Iceberg Finance in April 2022.
Recognition since
Under Iceberg Finance, the platform's approach has kept earning national attention at the CanadianSME awards:
- Réal Breton, CEO of Iceberg Finance and iFinance Canada, named Technopreneur of the Year (2024).
- Iceberg Finance Group, finalist for Digital Business of the Year and nominated for Best Tech Business (2024).
- iFinance Canada, nominated three years running.
iFinance Pay is a trademark of its owner. Context on the April 2022 acquisition, the 10,000+ merchant figure and the awards is from Iceberg Finance and iFinance Canada's public releases.
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