Financial technology is one of the faster moving sectors in Canada, where startups launch often, innovation is disruptive, and the competition is fierce.
With so much news, data, and events to cover across the country, Fintech.ca leans on active professionals in the field to help keep our audience properly informed and up-to-date.
Fintech.ca goes beyond news reporting to gain deeper insight into matters of interest from experts across Canada.
This edition of “Expert Wisdom: Fintech” features the always-hot topic of real estate.
Digitizing Real Estate
Real estate is the single-largest purchase most Canadians will ever make, but as money and data become digital, there is still much that is managed manually in the average real estate transaction.
Fintech.ca sat down with Mark DiFilippo of Dye & Durham to discuss how that’s changing, and how it will impact financial processes, legal practices, and payments.
DiFillippo believes there “hasn’t been effective and secure ways to connect all parties in a real estate transaction digitally to date.”
He points to “technology friction points that don’t allow for the legal professional or financial institution to process a real estate transaction effectively and securely” as a problem that his fintech, and others in the business, are actively working to address.
His own platform digitizes data involved in a real estate transaction, moving “all of the data that goes back and forth between parties during the transaction— things like mortgage instructions, payouts and discharges—digitally, securely, in near real-time and at the press of a button.”
Other Canadian firms pioneering the digital era of real estate include Calgary-based proptech Ownly, which aims to be “the Shopify of real estate,” and Gryd, a Winnipeg firm that leverages digital tech to optimize real estate space.
There’s also Montreal-based Wiseday and Toronto’s Properly.
Real Estate Investing
In Canada, it’s hard to talk about real estate and not mention investing. For Canadians, property has always been an investment, whether through becoming a homeowner or buying into REITs and other opportunities.
We recently spoke with Mike Sroka, the chief executive officer of Dealpath, a deal-flow management and analytics software startup. Fintech.ca sat down with Sroka, who cofounded the company, to learn more about his purpose-built real estate platform.
“Dealpath was built to empower [institutional] investors to make the best investment decisions,” he explained. “Being able to have a command centre like Dealpath that allows all pertinent parties to have easy access to real-time data and insights has created operational advantages that these businesses have never had before.”
For the retail investor, fintech startups like Toronto-based Wealthsimple and Vancouver-based Addy offer Canadians access to a range of real estate investment opportunities with minimal barriers to entry.
“In the past, the sharing of information was done manually,” Sroka said, “which understandably led to inefficiencies.”
He lamented how information was being “shared through an incredibly antiquated method of collaboration.”
Today however, the adoption of software platforms “has really streamlined these antiquated processes” and brought investment management and retail investing “into a new digital age that leads to better and faster execution of investment strategies.”
And heck, you can even invest in real estate in the Metaverse.
Leave a Reply