FundMore

08/28/2026

Two Canadian financial data points landed within 24 hours of each other last week. Read side by side, they say more than either does alone.

Thursday: the Bank of Canada's Q2 SLOS showed overall business lending conditions at -1.04, down from +0.96 in Q1. First negative reading since Q4 2025.

Wednesday and Thursday: Capco put first-party fraud alone at a C$2.5B Canadian FI economic exposure, with 36% of Canadians hit by attempted payment fraud in the last two years, and only 33% very confident their FI would protect them.

Two files, one customer.

The applicant whose credit conditions just tightened is the same person whose incentive to stretch an application, dispute a legitimate charge, or lean on friendly-fraud tactics just got stronger. If credit models and fraud models score them separately, each will blame the other for the loss.

Three questions worth the exec table this week:

Are we treating first-party fraud as fraud loss or as credit loss - and does that choice flatter or worsen our headline PCL?

If business non-price conditions tighten another notch in Q3, which segments do we pull back from first?

With 52% of Canadians unable to recall being told anything about deepfake threats by their FI, what do we publish in the next 90 days that would earn a retention point?

Q3 earnings starts Monday. The RTR By-law and Rules come into force the same day. The lenders whose fraud, credit, and customer communication stories are already the same will make the next six weeks look easy.

Read more: https://hubs.li/Q04vF4NC0

08/20/2026

Monday, August 24. Payments Canada By-law No. 10 and the Real-Time Rail Rules come into force. It's the regulatory ignition point for Canada's 24/7/365, instant, irrevocable, data-rich account-to-account payment system.

Production launch is still Q4 2026. Interac e-Transfer migration begins H1 2027. Full volumes across all partner institutions by Q3 2027. The strategic timer, though, starts this week.

Three properties of RTR that quietly break most Canadian financial services assumptions:

• Instant settlement, not overnight batch.

• Irrevocable payments — no next-day pull-back lane.

• 24/7/365 — Sundays and Boxing Day included.

Every Canadian lender's fraud, treasury, disputes, collections, and product design was built assuming some version of "the money settles later." That assumption expires as RTR volumes ramp through 2027.

Three questions worth answering honestly this quarter:

• Do your fraud controls run in real time, or in an overnight batch you'd rather not talk about?

• Which of your products would meaningfully improve if funds settled in seconds, and which would break?

• Who inside your firm owns "instant and irrevocable" as a design constraint, not a compliance box?

The lenders who use Q4 2026 to design new instant-settlement products (funding-at-approval, payroll on-demand, disbursement-at-decision, real-time commercial cash management) will get the first Canadian case studies. The ones who don't will spend 2027 patching a fraud and dispute stack that was designed for a batch world.

Full breakdown on the FundMore blog.

The RTR By-law and Rules take effect August 24, 2026. Q4 launch. Full volumes by Q3 2027. What Canadian lenders should actually do about it before their fraud, treasury, product, and underwriting stacks meet an instant, irrevocable, always-on payment system.

08/12/2026

PwC surveyed 1,004 US financial services leaders on AI and workforce planning. It's the most candid Big Four survey I've read this year, and the numbers are worth walking your executive team through.

The headlines:

90% say firms need to move faster; 77% say their own firm isn't moving fast enough.

78% expect their workforce to shrink 20%+ over five years.

91% are already paying more for AI skills; 86% say AI training beats an MBA for many hires.

77% say most AI investments aren't delivering measurable ROI.

Only 42% have done enterprise-wide workforce modeling.

90% say shadow AI is creating regulatory risk.

Read those next to each other and the report's own uncomfortable framing lands: most firms aren't planning for an AI-enabled workforce; they're planning for a smaller workforce and hoping AI fills the gap. Those are not the same plan.

For Canadian lenders, three of these findings translate hard. 41% cited fragmented, low-quality data as their top barrier — Canadian firms operate under PIPEDA, Law 25, OSFI B-10, and the agentic AI bulletin, so data hygiene isn't optional. Shadow AI at 35% "significant extent" is a governance emergency dressed as a productivity story. And the survey's no-consensus finding on who owns AI agent risk is, under the agentic AI bulletin, not a debate for us; it's a required answer.

Three questions to bring to your next executive meeting:

Are you designing the workforce you'll need, or modeling the one you'll cut?

Where does the specializing signal in your AI live — inside your credit policy, or inside a vendor's workforce that can be poached?

In one sentence, who is accountable for material harm from an AI agent's decision at your firm?

Find the full breakdown:

PwC surveyed 1,004 financial services executives on AI and workforce planning. The results are candid about what's actually happening, and unusually blunt about the gap between talking about an AI-enabled workforce and building one. What that means for Canadian lenders.

08/06/2026

Ramp officially launched in Canada this week. Canada is its first market outside the United States. That is a strategy choice, not a product launch.

A US$44B spend platform looked at every English-speaking G7 market and picked ours. Reasonable interpretation: Canadian commercial banking has enviable margins and unenviable software. The mid-market CFO has been asking for a modern spend tool for a decade. Ramp took the pattern seriously.

What that means for Canadian banks and lenders. Whoever owns the daily spend surface owns the CFO's attention. Whoever owns the CFO's attention gets first look at the operating line, the FX, the working capital loan and the growth financing. A lender one integration away from the CFO's day-to-day is a lender they call after they have already decided.

Three questions worth answering honestly this quarter:

1. Where does the CFO actually live? In your online business banking portal sometimes, or in their AP/expense tool every day?

2. Which of your "products" would a modern spend platform absorb first? Corporate cards, expense, bill pay. Payroll and lending are next if you leave the door open.

3. How does your commercial onboarding compare to Ramp's? If it takes a week and Ramp takes an afternoon, the rest of the strategy conversation is theoretical.

Three lenses that keep working: policy trains the agent, not the vendor; digital twins beat data pools; agents sit on top of what you already run. What a US challenger cannot copy is decades of Canadian credit policy. Defend the surface Ramp cannot attack.

Ramp did not need to enter Canada. It picked Canada. Read the signal.

Read More:

A $44B US spend platform just launched in Canada as its first international market. The interesting story is not the product; it's what the entry playbook says about our commercial banking stack.

08/03/2026

Every lender in the country already runs an adversarial review process. It's called a credit committee.

Independent assessment before discussion. A designated challenger. Adverse scenarios sized by severity, not by whose file it is. Dissent on the record. A named human who decided.
You believe in structured challenge before 'mitment. You just apply it to loans — and not to your own decisions.

Tomorrow at 9am ET on The Signal, our CEO Chris Grimes and Reuven Gorsht from Deeded get into what changes when AI stops being the thing that does your work and becomes the thing that argues with it. Chris walks through the nine-seat advisory board he built to pressure-test every major decision before he commits — and the one it changed.

Also covered: where it fails, and why "it agreed with me" is the most dangerous output your AI can produce.

Live on Substack. 30-40 minutes, no filler

Starting Aug 4 at 9:00 AM EDT

08/01/2026

Saving an hour is a refund. Reinvesting that hour is leverage.

Most people use AI reactively. They rewrite an email or summarize a document, and the hour they save simply disappears into more meetings and more inbox noise. In his latest piece, FundMore co-founder and CEO Chris Grimes explains what it actually takes to change that equation. He walks through auditing where your time really goes, delegating the underlying pattern instead of individual tasks, and building systems that compound in value week after week.

The results are striking. A calendar that once ran wall-to-wall with meetings now has only a handful, even as the business serves more customers than before. Chris also shares an important caution: capability is advancing faster than most roadmaps can keep up with, so the real skill lies in knowing what to automate and what judgment to hold onto yourself.

Read Chris Grimes' full breakdown to see exactly how this played out.

https://hubs.li/Q04rz4hw0

Everyone is getting time back from AI. Almost nobody is reinvesting it.

07/30/2026

What if your calendar going quiet was actually a sign your business is running better than ever?

Seven months ago, FundMore co-founder and CEO Chris Grimes set out to make our company truly AI-first. It started with a simple habit: capturing the knowledge that usually disappears the moment a decision gets made. That knowledge became the foundation for AI agents that now help draft proposals, flag NDA terms, and summarize meetings in real time.

The result isn't just faster workflows. It's a team spending less time managing tasks and more time on high-value work, with a leader who now has open mornings instead of back-to-back meetings.

Chris shares the full story, including what worked, what didn't, and how the team got everyone on board.

Read Chris Grimes' full breakdown to see how FundMore is putting this into practice.

https://hubs.li/Q04rgX1M0

In January my calendar was wall to wall. Next week: five meetings.

07/29/2026

Mortgage Professionals Canada dropped a survey this week. Broker channel share is at 38% overall and 48% for first-time buyers. The number that matters is a different one.

54% of Canadians still cite "best rate" as their top reason for using a broker; that share is down 5 points from 2024. Meanwhile 40% of first-time buyers cited "help understanding my options," up 14 points. The channel is being hired for advice, not for saving 5 bps.

What that means for lenders. The competition for broker files is quietly moving off rate boards and onto operational behaviour. Three things brokers measure every day, even if they never write it down:

90th-percentile time to condition (not the median).

Condition consistency across different underwriters looking at the same file.

Exception credibility when a reasonable ask escalates.

Three durable lenses hold up in this environment regardless of vendor: policy trains the agent, not the vendor; digital twins beat data pools; agents sit on top of existing infrastructure so BDMs and brokers stay fluent.

Losing a first-time buyer at origination is not losing one deal; it is losing a 30-year household relationship to whoever the broker recommended. Rate does not repeat. Behaviour does.

MPC's July 2026 consumer survey shows Canada's broker channel deepening, especially among first-time buyers. Here's what actually changed, and what lenders should do about it in Q3.

07/28/2026

Most lenders bought AI this year. Very few got time back.

PwC says 56% of companies report zero ROI on AI. The tools aren't the problem — the leverage is.

Today at 9am EST, our CEO Chris Grimes goes live with Reuven Gorsht for Episode 2 of The Signal: Using AI for Leverage in Your Day, Week and Month.
Real systems, not theory — the morning agent that briefs the whole business by 6am, the weekly review that finds the hours your back office is quietly losing, and the monthly automation bets where one winner pays for nine misses.

If your team is drowning in files while your AI licenses sit idle, this one's for you.

Watch live:

Starting Jul 28 at 9:00 AM EDT

07/25/2026

Every lender is racing to adopt AI models, but the smartest model in the world still doesn't know your business. In his latest article, our co-founder and CEO Chris Grimes breaks down why the real competitive edge isn't the AI you rent, it's the context you already own: your institutional knowledge, your embedded workflows, and the trust you've built over years.

He shares a real example of an AI model flagging a perfectly good loan as an "exception" simply because it never learned what an experienced underwriter already knew. The lesson: models are becoming commoditized infrastructure, and the institutions that win will be the ones who make their own data, processes, and relationships machine-readable.

Chris also lays out a simple "context audit" any lender can run this Monday morning.

Read the full breakdown to learn where your institution's context really lives and how to start owning it.
https://hubs.li/Q04qLMll0

Everyone's talking about context. Nobody's telling you where yours lives.