đŠ Competition Is the Point: Rob Khazzam and Jeff Adamson on Building Fintech in Canada
A recap of the Tech Founders Stampede Summit fireside on July 6th at House831, featuring Rob Khazzam (Float) and Jeff Adamson (Neo Financial).
Two of the most successful founders in Canadian fintech, on stage together for the second time at a Tech Thursday event (the first was back in 2024). Rob runs Float. Jeff co-founded Skip and then Neo. Both of them have spent their careers building directly into the teeth of an industry that has barely changed in a century.
They joined us at the first annual âTech Founderâs Stampede Summitâ that we co-hosted with House831, with help from the C100 and Fintechâs Canada. We had 50 founders from across Canada join us. The event was sponsored by Float, BLG, Boast, RBCx, PNC Bank, and Fortinet.
This is our recap of one of the conversations from that summit. It got spicy. The panelists:
Rob Khazzam, Co-Founder and CEO of Float
Jeff Adamson, Co-Founder of Neo Financial (and SkipTheDishes)
âIf youâre a founder building a startup and youâre complaining about the government or regulation, thatâs a victim mentality. Itâs not going to get you very far.â Rob Khazzam
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Introduction: An Industry Frozen in Time
Jeff set the stakes early. Canadian banking has been essentially frozen for over a century, and somehow it costs about the same to do your banking today as it did 150 years ago, despite everything technology has done to every other industry. Five players own roughly 96% of the market. That is the wall both founders have spent their careers running at.
But the wall is finally cracking. Questrade just became the first new Schedule I bank in a very long time. Revolut has moved in. Ramp is doing more here. And a wave of homegrown fintechs is raising real money, including Floatâs own recent round. Jeff also flagged the flip side: capital is concentrating hard, with a sliver of companies absorbing a huge share of it, so if you are not a category winner or an AI-native company, the fight for funding has only gotten harder.
We worked through three things. Why the new competition is good for everyone, how these companies actually move, and why the founders think the real bottleneck is mindset, not policy.
1. Competition Is the Point
The takeaway: New entrants do not just win customers. They force the incumbents to get better, and every so often they force the rules to change.
Both founders are unusually enthusiastic about competition, including the competition coming for them. The logic is simple. An oligopoly under no pressure has no reason to improve, and 150 years of flat banking costs is the receipt. When Float ships a feature that makes a bank executive turn to their army of VPs and ask why they do not have it yet, that is a win for every Canadian SME, whether or not they ever become a Float customer.
Jeffâs favourite example is the NSF fee. At Neo they never charged one. Instead of dinging a customer $45 the moment their account ran short, they would notify the customer, hold the payment for a day to give them a chance to top up, and only decline it if the money never showed. The government noticed, asked why the incumbents were charging $45 for the privilege of being broke, and capped the fee at roughly $10.
âItâs literally the definition of getting kicked when youâre down.â Jeff Adamson, on the old $45 NSF fee
âCompetition is whatâs going to benefit us all. Itâs going to force the incumbents to be better.â Jeff Adamson
Why this matters: The NSF story is a clean example of the whole thesis. A fintech does the right thing, the incumbents look bad by comparison, and policy follows. Competition did not just move the market, it moved the law.
Brought to you by:
Calgary has always brought the energy. But spending time at the Tech Founders Stampede Summit made it impossible to ignore just how much is being built here right now.
As a sponsor of this yearâs Summit, we had the chance to be in the room with some of the best founders in the country â people building world-class products, not just for Alberta, not just for Canada, but for global markets. The conversations were sharp, the ambition was real, and honestly, it still feels early. Thatâs the exciting part.
Float is Canadaâs intelligent financial operating system, combining modern financial services and software to help businesses spend, save, and grow. Trusted by more than 8,000 Canadian companies, Float provides high-limit corporate cards, automated expense management, next-day bill payments, high-yield accounts, and industry-leading support, all built in Canada, for Canada. Find us at floatfinancial.com
2. Speed Is the Moat
The takeaway: In a market full of five-business-day incumbents, the durable advantage is velocity. It is also the hardest thing to protect as you scale.
Robâs whole operating philosophy is built on urgency. Customers who are told to wait five business days get an answer in five minutes. Things the market builds in six months, Float builds in six weeks. He is allergic to victory laps.
âWeâre cockroaches. What are we doing today to make the business better, and act as though this whole thing could disappear at any moment if we donât stay ahead.â Rob Khazzam
That attitude has a name. At Uber, Rob ran on a system he calls âkills or dies.â Every Monday, each person commits to something they will definitively finish that week. Not âwork on the sales pipeline,â but âsign 10 drivers.â Not âlook into a vendor,â but âpick one and submit the purchase order.â At the end of the week the team does accountability out loud, in front of everyone, including the misses. He brought the same ritual to Float.
âNot tomorrow, today. Not next week, this week.â Rob Khazzam
Jeffâs take on culture was more about stakes than speed, and he had the Skip stories to back it up (the stair-running for late sales reps, the âprime timeâ call blocks where opening your mouth on the floor was a nightmare, the rep who did the stairs on crutches). His point underneath the war stories: culture is a distillation of the foundersâ values, and the job is to make people feel the stakes are genuinely high without crushing them.
âYou want people to feel like the stakes are super, super high in what theyâre doing.â Jeff Adamson
Why this matters: Speed is the one thing an oligopoly cannot copy quickly. It is a cultural asset, not a product feature, which is exactly why both founders obsess over it and why it gets harder to hold as headcount climbs.
3. Build, Donât Complain
The takeaway: Starting a company is a form of national service, and most complaining about policy is a distraction from the actual job of building. They also think Canada has some real, shameful policy failures worth naming.
Jeffâs framing was that Canada over-indexes on old, concentrated incumbents. The average age of the top ten companies in the country is around 145 years, and when you work inside a business your great-grandparent might have worked at, you become a steward rather than a builder. The downside of a big swing is enormous, so nobody takes it. His fix is cultural: get more people to see that starting companies and taking on the incumbents is how you actually build a country.
âThe way we can make our community and our country a lot better is by taking on some of these big incumbents and pushing them.â Jeff Adamson
That mindset doesn't stop at the company level, it extends into policy too. There's a real push right now to get bigger, growth-oriented ideas, SR&ED reform, tax reform, even the year-of-national-service debate, into the public conversation so politicians have the cover to act.
That's the productive side of pushing for change. But the founders were just as quick to name where policy has genuinely failed. Both are frustrated with open banking, or consumer-driven banking, which finally got royal assent after roughly a decade of consultation. The comparison Jeff reached for: imagine still living in the era where you could not keep your phone number when you switched carriers. That is banking today.
The room pushed further on where that regulatory bar sits when a question from Dan Eisner of True North Mortgage turned the conversation to bank licenses. The consensus: a full Schedule I license is not the panacea founders imagine. The capital requirements are punishing, and for most fintechs you are better off solving for money movement and data portability than becoming a deposit-taking institution. Rob's version: Float has no interest in becoming a bank. It wants faster rails and customer-permissioned data, not a balance sheet to defend.
Why this matters: This is the productive tension of the whole evening. These are the founders most committed to building their way out of any problem, and also the ones most willing to say out loud that some of Canadaâs policy failures are real and embarrassing. Both things are true. The discipline is knowing which bucket a given complaint belongs in.
Takeaways for Builders
Compete on speed, not permission. If the incumbent takes five business days, do it in five minutes. Velocity is the one advantage an oligopoly cannot quickly copy.
Make âkills or diesâ your unit of planning. Weekly, definitive, and public. Not âwork on X,â but âX is done by Friday,â with accountability out loud.
Hire for tenacity over pedigree. Robâs view: bet on a bright, self-starting person to learn almost anything. You are not building rockets.
When you do need domain expertise, hire the misfits. The people who got pushed out of the big incumbent often carry the most valuable tacit knowledge and the right risk tolerance for a fast company.
Build the fallback, not the bank. Keep the license option in your back pocket in case the incumbents gang up, but a full deposit-taking charter can bury you under capital requirements. Solve for rails and data portability instead.
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