Canada-based La Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec has partnered with Desjardins Group to create a FinTech investment vehicle.
The venture capital fund will look to support new FinTech and finance-focused artificial intelligence companies in Québec and Canada. Key areas of interest for the firm are technology impacting investments, payments, chief acquisition and retention, data analytics, deposits and loans, security and insurance.
The vehicle is set to have a maximum size of $75m, of which the two sponsors will commit $25m each. Already several institutional investors are interested in participating in the fundraise, with a first close expected by the end of the year.
la Caisse chief operations and IT officer Pierre Miron said, “With its high concentration of talent in information technology and the robustness of its financial industry, all the pieces are in place for Québec to see the emergence of a first-rate FinTech industry. We strongly believe that this new fund will foster the development of new technology solutions that will significantly improve business processes and operational efficiency.”
Earlier this year CDPQ made a co-investment with Novacap in to end-to-end payment platform Pivotal Payments. The LP also made a commitment earlier in the year to accounts payable solution provider AvidXchange, in a deal worth $100m.
Despite the Canada FinTech sector seeing YoY progression between 2014 and 2016, this year looks set to break this after a disappointing start to the year. In the first half of the year only $120m was funded into Canada FinTech, which is just over a fifth of the total investments in 2016.
Copyright © 2017 FinTech Global
