Market Overview: Fintech, co-hosted with Affirm
A curated Toronto Tech Week session for founders, operators, and builders shaping the next wave of Canadian fintech.
Over two hours, we’ll unpack where the market is heading across consumer payments, embedded finance, personal finance, and vertical fintech.
Expect practical insight from investors, leaders, and operators on where momentum is building, what customers are demanding, and where real opportunity exists right now. The session features a market-setting opening, founder perspectives from emerging fintech companies, and a featured fireside chat with Wayne Pommen, CRO at Affirm, and Alex Norman, General Partner at N49P.
If you’re building in fintech and want a sharper signal, stronger context, and better conversations, this is the room.
Speakers
Wayne Pommen currently serves as Chief Revenue Officer where he oversees Affirm's revenue-generating activities and teams. Previously, he was Affirm's Head of International. Wayne joined Affirm in January 2021 through the Company’s acquisition of PayBright, Canada’s leading BNPL provider, where he was President and CEO from 2015. Under his leadership, PayBright grew from 5 to 250 employees and emerged as one of Canada’s leading fintech companies with retail clients including Apple, Hudson’s Bay, Wayfair, Samsung, and Sephora.
Prior to PayBright, Wayne was a Principal at TorQuest Partners and a Consultant at Bain & Company. He also previously served on the Stakeholder Advisory Council of Payments Canada. Wayne has held various public and private company directorships, including serving as Director and Audit Committee Chair of the Hudson’s Bay Company from IPO in 2012 to reprivatization in 2020, and of IOU Financial, a fintech focused on small business lending.
Wayne holds an A.B. from Harvard University and a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge.
Jane Podbelskaya is Founder & Managing Partner of Charge Forward, an embedded finance advisory and intelligence firm working with vertical SaaS and AI platforms. Charge Forward helps non-financial software companies embed and scale financial products - from payments and lending to card issuing, insurance and banking. Charge Forward also partners with VC and PE funds to operationalize embedded finance across their portfolios. Jane writes and speaks regularly on embedded finance, focusing on how it creates new revenue streams and durable platform moats for software companies.
Before founding Charge Forward, Jane spent over a decade in venture capital - first at Georgian, investing in growth-stage B2B SaaS companies, then at Information Venture Partners, investing in fintech and financial software companies. Earlier in her career, Jane worked as a software engineer and solutions architect at ABBYY and Xerox, and as a management consultant at Bain & Company. She holds a Master's degree in Computer Science and Mathematics, and an MBA from the Rotman School of Management.
Ricky Lai is a General Partner at Portage, where he has invested in early-stage fintech companies globally since 2017, becoming a partner in 2021. He works closely with portfolio companies including KOHO, Clark, Nesto, and TheGuarantors.
Before Portage, Ricky was an early employee at a US consumer lending startup, an Associate at Mithril360 (the analytics affiliate of Mithril Capital Management), and a member of KPMG's deal advisory practice focused on software and healthcare investments.
Ricky holds a B.Sc. and M.Acc. from the University of Waterloo and is a Chartered Professional Accountant (CPA, CA).
Abraham Thomas is the Founder and CEO of Windkey AI, a venture-funded tech startup at the intersection of finance, data and AI, currently in stealth.
He was previously the Founder and Chief Data Officer of Quandl, a tech startup whose customers included most of America's largest banks, asset managers and hedge funds. Quandl was acquired by Nasdaq in 2019 in a large exit.
Abraham is an active angel investor and startup mentor. Before Quandl, he was a portfolio manager at Simplex Asset Management, a large quant hedge fund in Tokyo, where he built one of the bond market's first algorithmic trading systems. He writes a popular newsletter on data, markets, and technology at pivotal.substack.com, and holds a degree in Engineering Physics from IIT Bombay.
Thanks to our Partner
TechTO is Canada’s largest community of tech builders - connecting 60,000+ founders, operators, and investors through year-round meetups, curated dinners, peer tables, and media storytelling. Interested in learning more? techto.org. For sponsorship inquiries, reach out to [email protected].
Toronto Tech Week is a citywide celebration of the people building what’s next. From May 25–29, 2026, founders, investors, and builders come together for hundreds of community-led events across Toronto, connecting tens of thousands of people around Canadian tech. torontotechweek.com
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