Toronto finance international (TFI) is a public-private partnership between Canada's largest financial services institutions and the government. Their work is focused on growing Canada's financial sector and promoting its global leadership role in financial services. TFI also supports fintechs in their ambition to expand to new markets through the trade missions they arrange around the world.

TFI’s first mission to London with 6 Canadian fintech scale-ups took place in Dec 2019. The goal was to provide the visiting delegation with opportunities to meet with new business prospects and industry experts to help them gain a better understanding of the UK market.

TFI was looking for an in-market partner with a large network and a good understanding of the fintech ecosystem to deliver the programme. Newfound’s market entry expertise and direct fintech experience provided a distinctive offer against the five other contenders vying to work with TFI on the mission.

We began the project by working closely with each company to understand their goals and priorities and building out a profile that we could share with identified targets in our trusted network. Through our targeted outreach, we then arranged a curated programme of meetings for each company which enabled them to gather actionable insights and explore relevant opportunities for their business in the UK.

One of the key highlights for the delegation was the roundtable discussion Newfound hosted which provided an opportunity to learn first-hand from experienced Canadian founders, experts and advisers on what it is like to enter the UK market. Together with the informative sessions organised with London Stock Exchange and FCA, these made up the most valuable parts of the Canadian’s market visit according to feedback.

We are now engaging with one of the fintechs from the delegation to further validate their market opportunity in the wealth management software space and have been asked by TFI to bid again for their next TFI trade mission to Dublin and London.

Our previous missions:

Fintech Mission to Australia - 18 UK fintechs including Railsbank, Voxsmart, and CoGo explore opportunities down under.

Fintech Mission to the UK - We helped 30 fintechs from 9 countries understand the UK market via our virtual programme

Western Australia Mission to the UK - A government sponsored virtual trade mission to the UK for 10 high-growth tech companies.