With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/813780
BCBUSINESS.CA MAY 2017 BCBUSINESS 41 private equity for Connor, Clark & Lunn Financial Group and in mergers and acquisitions advisory at Royal Bank of Canada. Sandhu says Grow was different because it didn't force people to choose between a fintech startup and a banking brand they trusted. "We looked at it and said, 'That's the piece that's fundamentally broken,'" he recalls. "We think that consumers want a better experience—a more affordable, personalized, digital experience—but they don't necessarily want to be forced out of their incumbent relationships with old, established brands." Grow, which has almost 30 staff, now works with most of the Big Five banks; its clients also include many credit unions. The firm's offerings range from consumer lending and fraud prevention to analysis of customer data, which banks can use to improve their products and services. Grow's licensing fees are typically lower than those charged by big enterprise software providers, Sandhu says. The company uses a model that he compares to revenue sharing: the bulk of fees only kick in when clients start making money. So far, Grow—whose top investor is Markus Frind, founder of dating website Plenty of Fish—has raised about $10 million in funding. It has a road map to move beyond retail banking, into areas such as insurance, retirement planning and wealth management. The firm, which has a Toronto office, also plans to expand outside Canada next year. Although the U.S. may not be a prime target thanks to its web of federal and state regulators, Sandhu admits, Grow is eyeing the U.K. and Australia. At home, his company faces scrutiny from clients for being a mostly cloud-based service provider. As part of its effort to ease security concerns, Grow hires third parties to try to hack its systems, Sandhu says. "Building confidence from a security perspective is probably our biggest hurdle to date." —N.R. Pay Dirt Cleantech firm MineSense offers the mining industry a way to increase profits while cutting pollution ining companies everywhere are hav- ing a tough time finding high-grade ore because others have beaten them to it. At the same time, the industry faces pres- sure to clean up its environmental act. MineSense Technologies Ltd. seeks to solve both of those prob- lems. Near its headquarters in South Vancouver, the cleantech company keeps a front-end loader retrofit- ted with ShovelSense, a data analytics system that uses X-ray and other sensors to measure ore quality at mine sites. The system also works on conveyer belts, but MineSense is the only player with a solu- tion for mobile equipment, explains president and CEO Jeff More. Comparing this approach with the traditional method of taking core samples and sending them to a lab, More says it allows miners to examine ore in real time. As a result, they can find good material in areas designated as waste and preconcentrate what goes from the mine to the mill. Besides boosting revenue by making mills more efficient, the MineSense system cuts electricity and water use. It also means that less waste ends up in tailings dams. "The mines that we're currently working with, the impact to their bottom line that we can have on an annual basis per mine is between $20 million and $200 million," says More, who joined MineSense last year. Clients can also reduce electricity and water consumption by 20 to 25 per cent for each mill unit produced, and tailings by up to 40 per cent, he adds. WORK IN PROGRESS 2010: A relic of B.C.'s retailing past is brought back to life when the Woodward's building reopens in the fall. The Vancouver development on Hastings–with its mix of affordable and market housing, gallery space, retail and an SFU satellite campus–is a pivot point for Canada's "poorest postal code." Whether that pivot toward gentrification has been good for all concerned remains hotly debated. 2015: One of the most successful e-commerce plays of the past decade, Indochino, sees Victoria-based founder Kyle Vucko step down. The retailer, a pio- neer in selling made-to- measure suits online, has made the rare evolution from web to bricks-and- mortar in recent years: by 2020, it anticipates 150 retail outlets worldwide. 2016: B.C. biotech giant QLT Inc. merges with Boston-based Aegerion Pharmaceuticals Inc. and becomes Novelion Therapeutics Inc. QLT was started by scien- tist Julia Levy and four others as Quadra Logic Technologies in 1981; its Visudyne, used for treating macular degeneration, would become the most lucra- tive drug in the history of eye medicine.