FundMore

06/16/2026

Open banking just stopped being theoretical in Canada.

On June 9, FirstOntario Credit Union went live on open banking under the Consumer-Driven Banking Act. One of the first credit unions in Canada to activate consent-based financial data sharing in production on Day 1 of the framework.

Three things in that announcement that matter for every Canadian lending executive:

1. FirstOntario picked its open banking partners eighteen months before the rule required it. The lenders who treated 2024 and 2025 as a building window are live now; those still waiting for "final clarity" are watching from the sidelines.

2. FirstOntario did not rip-and-replace its core to get there. The capability runs on top of existing systems through FIS Everlink and Flinks Outbound, which already has 300+ fintechs connected. Extending the stack, not rebuilding it, is the model that scales.

3. The infrastructure clock is real. Bill C-15 received Royal Assent in March. Technical standards are coming in the next few months. OSFI Guideline E-21 comes into full effect on September 1. Every open banking partner becomes a third-party relationship to inventory under B-10. The institutions that were built early are also documented early.

For underwriting, the strategic question is what runs on top of the new inputs. Consent-based data feeds compress document collection; the decisioning layer is where the competitive advantage lives.

The model is not the moat. Foundation models give everyone the same reading and reasoning capability. What separates good underwriting from generic underwriting is whether the AI is trained on this lender's policy and corrected by this lender's underwriters. That specializing signal is the moat, and it sits with the lender, not the vendor.

FundMore deploys as an agent within a lender's existing LOS. No rip-and-replace. No 12-month IT project. Pure infrastructure that never originates, funds, or brokers a loan, which means it does not compete with its customers for borrowers.

FirstOntario showed what early looks like. The lenders building on top of open banking infrastructure now, with policy-trained AI applied to the cleaner inputs it creates, will define the underwriting standard for the decade.

https://hubs.li/Q04lD_mk0

06/10/2026

Five months. Fifteen new members. One rail.

Payments Canada just added five more direct members: Beem Credit Union, Ebury Partners Canada, Shaype Canada, Libro Credit Union, and Newton Crypto. That brings the 2026 total to fifteen new direct members; the largest single-year expansion in its history.

The Real-Time Rail launches in Q3 2026. The fifteen new members are positioned to integrate at launch; everyone else is positioned to catch up.

Three shifts to track:

1) Credit unions just gained a structural advantage. Libro, Beem, Meridian, and Tru now have direct rail access, with no central intermediary and no waiting room.

2) Fintechs no longer pay the intermediary tax. Ten PSPs are now direct members; the "swipe-in partner" economics banks quietly relied on are eroding.

3) Crypto sits at the table. Newton is the first digital-asset platform with direct membership, a signal for how stablecoin policy will land in Budget 2026.

For lenders, the practical question is funding velocity. Faster rails mean faster funding, faster reversals, faster reconciliation. The competitive geography of Canadian payments is being redrawn in real time.

RTR readiness is a 2026 priority, not a 2027 one.

Read More: https://hubs.li/Q04kYp620

06/09/2026

The headless LOS has arrived, and lenders are finally in the driver's seat.

For two decades, lenders bought workflows they didn't write and bent their operations around them. That era is over. When Blend and Salesforce shipped MCP-powered platforms this spring, they weren't announcing the future. They were announcing they would no longer be defining it.

With MCP, lenders can now author their own workflows, change underwriting logic in days instead of quarters, and stop paying rent on a process that was never really theirs. The vendor still owns the substrate: compliance rails, audit trails, and data integrity. But the workflow belongs to the lender now.

The lenders who act on this will build real competitive advantage.

Stop renting your workflow. Start owning your operation.

https://hubs.li/Q04kQ53w0



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A month ago, Blend launched Autopilot MCP.

06/06/2026

Most AI governance in lending is just photographing a moving target and calling it a policy.

Six weeks of committee work produces an approved tools list that is already outdated by the time it is ratified. FundMore CEO Chris Grimes calls this Control Debt: the compounding gap between how fast AI evolves and how fast your rules about it can be rewritten.

The solution is not less governance. It is smarter governance. Lock down the invariants like data handling, accountability, and decision verification, and let the implementation move. Govern the direction, not the inventory.

The lenders who freeze their stack to feel safe are the ones who will fall behind.
Read Chris's full article to learn how to build for adaptation instead:
https://hubs.li/Q04knVBX0

06/03/2026

The Bank of Canada just made it official; the risk Canadian lenders have been operating against for three years is over.

From the 2026 Financial Stability Report, released May 28: "we expect this risk to have fully passed by the second half of 2027." The risk in question is the pandemic-era mortgage renewal payment shock. The final wave lands in the next 12 months, and then it is done.

In the same statement, the BoC named the new top-of-stack risk: AI. The exact language is that AI "may also increase the speed, scale and sophistication of cyber attacks."

That is a signal swap, not a status update. For three years, every credit committee, every stress test, and every digital transformation roadmap has been calibrated against the renewal cliff. The BoC just removed that calibration. The risk replacing it is operational, not credit; it lives in the technology stack itself.

Three implications for Canadian lenders, especially the mid-market and non-bank tier:

Rebaseline the risk register. If pandemic renewals are still top three, the FSR has moved past you.

Audit AI-enabled lending workflows against the three vectors. Speed, scale, sophistication. For each, document the control and the gap.

Treat the audit trail as a product feature. A queryable decision log on every AI-assisted file is the new compliance floor.

The Big Six have the budgets and security teams to absorb this. The institutions in the second tier, the ones that spent 18 months racing to AI-enabled underwriting, have a narrower window. The FSR is the regulator-grade evidence you need to fund the next phase of the build.

What is your team retiring from its top-three risk list this quarter, and what is taking its place?

Read the full breakdown on the FundMore blog:

The Bank of Canada just declared the mortgage renewal shock essentially over and named AI cyber risk as the new top concern. Here's what that means for mid-market banks, credit unions, and non-bank lenders.

05/29/2026

Your underwriter isn't your bottleneck. Your stack is.

On a typical 72-hour file, genuine underwriting judgment takes about 30 minutes. The rest is waiting for documents to sync, data to reconcile, and conditions to propagate across disconnected systems.

The underwriter isn't slow. The infrastructure around them is.

At FundMore, we built around this insight. When data flows through a single, integrated architecture, invisible queues disappear and cycle times compress by days, not hours.

Stop hiring more people to wait faster. Fix the pipes.

🔗 Read the full piece by FundMore founder Chris Grimes: https://hubs.li/Q04jpPgD0

I was speaking with a mortgage lender last week, and I asked the typical sales question: what is your biggest challenge today?

05/28/2026

15 hours. Then three minutes.

TD's first agentic AI application is in live production for mortgages and HELOCs. Pre-adjudication that used to take roughly 15 hours now averages under three minutes; a ~300x speed-up.

What the agent actually does, per TD's May 21 disclosure:

- Scans client documents
- Calculates income
- Validates against policy
- Performs consent checks
- Verifies income
- Searches for discrepancies
- Auto-generates the underwriter memo

Three reads for everyone outside the Big Six.

1. Underwriting speed is now baseline, not differentiator. Once a TD client gets a three-minute pre-adjudication, the rest of the market recalibrates.

2. The Big Six are scaling a pattern, not shipping a feature. BMO just hired its first head of digital assets and tokenization on May 12. RBC, Scotia, CIBC, and National all run AI labs. Expect production launches across HELOCs, LOCs, and small businesses within two quarters.

3. Mid-market and non-bank lenders do not need a Layer 6; they need a platform. A $20B credit union or a private lender cannot replicate TD's AI research org and should not try. What works is buying the outcome via a platform: agentic underwriting, KYC, document classification, fraud detection, and compliance delivered as a service.

Historical Canadian banking adoption cycles for major Big Six operational moves run 12 to 18 months before becoming table stakes. That clock started on May 21.

Speed is the new disclosure. The institutions that pair last week's regulatory work with this week's underwriting rebuild are the ones the renewal wave hands the market to.

https://hubs.li/Q04j6gSZ0

05/22/2026

The average loan touches 20 systems before it funds, and none of them know about the file as a whole. That gap between good tools is where time, money, and borrowers get lost.

Our CEO, Chris Grimes, breaks down why the industry's "best of breed" approach created an architecture nobody owns and what it actually takes to fix it.

"You don't have a tool problem. You have an architecture problem."

👉 Read the full article: https://hubs.li/Q04hKxx20

05/20/2026

Bill C-29 was tabled April 27 and most coverage treated it as a single new agency. Read against the rest of the 2026 calendar, it is the third leg of a stool that now stands.

Three pillars, one direction of travel:

Supervision: FINTRAC under Bill C-12 (in force March 26). AMPs raised up to 40x. Mandatory compliance agreements. A new Very Serious violation for programs that are not "reasonably designed, risk-based and effective."

Enforcement: the new Financial Crimes Agency under Bill C-29. A dedicated federal investigator; mandate explicitly covers digital assets, designated Criminal Code offences, and PCMLTFA offences.

Prudential: OSFI's April 14 Annual Risk Outlook named non-bank financial institutions the #2 systemic threat. A new Credit Risk Management Guideline is out for consultation through July 29.

The non-bank-lender math is striking:

$401B in non-bank residential mortgage debt; up 19% since 2020.

65,233 private mortgages in Ontario alone, worth $32B.

Delinquency rates running roughly 11x the headline bank figure.

Over 50% of Canadian mortgages renewing between Jan 2026 and end of 2027.

Three readings worth taking forward:

1. The opacity argument is closing. Procedural rigour is supervisable. Conduct in digital assets is investigable. Credit-risk practices are about to be examinable. The three pillars overlap on every non-bank lender.

2. Effectiveness is the next examination axis. Programs that exist on paper but cannot produce evidence of outcomes are formally exposed.

3. Compliance infrastructure is now a competitive moat. Bank-grade tooling used to be the price of being federally regulated. Under the new stack it is the price of operating.

That last point is the gap FundMore Fathom is built to close: a freemium underwriting, CRM, and compliance platform purpose-built for private lenders, MICs, and alternative mortgage originators. Same infrastructure powering Canada's leading lenders ($60B+ in applications processed), no upfront cost. Waitlist live now; public beta summer 2026.

Full breakdown on the FundMore blog: https://hubs.li/Q04hfQx60

05/19/2026

Our CEO, Chris Grimes, just published a piece that is worth a read for anyone building or leading teams right now.

The real shift isn't jobs being replaced, it's friction being replaced. The five minutes here, twenty minutes there, the endless plumbing — all fill up the days of your smartest people.

Chris shares how FundMore tackled this head-on and what it means for the companies that figure it out first.

"Stop counting jobs. Start counting friction."

👉 Read the full article: https://hubs.li/Q04h3Lf_0

Last Tuesday at 7:30 am, I opened my laptop to a single document.