40 BCBusiness october 2016
David Gens
Founder, President and
CEO, Merchant advance
Capital Ltd.
D
avid Gens first developed a
taste for managing money
while studying at
ubc, in the
sauder school of business's
portfolio management program.
after a stint post-graduation at
cai capital Management, he felt
the urge to go solo–so, at 24, he
founded his own firm, Merchant
advance capital. Working with
a business model that's rare in
canada, Merchant provides loans
to small businesses based on their
volume of debit and credit card
transactions and other sources of
data–data that helps Merchant
determine their clients' creditwor-
thiness with increasing accuracy.
"incremental efficiency gains and
improvements have allowed us to
get data to make a more stream-
lined credit decision," says Gens,
now 29 and one of BCBusiness's
30 under 30 winners from 2015.
Merchant has seen revenues
almost double every year since
2012 and now employs 40 staff in
Vancouver and toronto. – J.P.
H
amed Shahbazi has seen the Internet in
all its phases—and built his company to
suit. "It feels like I've run three compa-
nies at this point," says Shahbazi, the
son of Iranian immigrants, laying out the ways
his business has adapted to the technolo‹y of
the times. In the late '90s, Tio built freestand-
ing kiosks so mall-goers could access their
email; in the mid-2000s, it shifted focus to
bill payment technolo‹y, building systems for
Chase Manhattan Bank and
HSBC; and since
2009, Tio has built bill payment software
that connects a consumer's smartphone with
the billing systems of big utilities or telecom
providers, including Rogers and
AT&T. Tio, a
publicly traded company, had revenues of $49
million last year and a market capitalization
of $198 million, with 80 of its 200 employees
based in Vancouver. "My only regret is that we
didn't fail faster in some of these cases," says
Shahbazi, "but eventually we did learn." — J.P.
Hamed Shahbazi
CEO, Tio networks Corp.
r u nn e r - u p
r u nn e r - u p
WINNER
F I n T E C h
