Key Takeaways
- Toronto has the largest financial services sector in North America outside of New York.
- The combination of finance and technology talent in Toronto is underappreciated globally.
- Canadian immigration policy is creating a talent concentration that few other markets can match.
Saim Abbasi has built companies in Toronto and has a specific perspective on the city's position in global finance and technology that is more grounded in operational reality than the promotional narratives that often dominate the conversation.
The Finance Cluster
Toronto is home to the largest concentration of financial services in North America outside of New York. The major Canadian banks, the pension funds, the insurance companies, and the growing fintech ecosystem that serves them represent a cluster of both customers and talent that creates real advantages for companies building financial technology.
The pension funds alone, CPPIB, Ontario Teachers, OTPP, and the others, manage assets that collectively represent one of the largest pools of institutional capital in the world. Their sophistication as investors and their willingness to invest in Canadian companies has created a capital environment that is distinctive relative to other North American cities outside of New York.
The Talent Story
Canada's immigration policy has made Toronto one of the most diverse cities in the world, with a particularly high concentration of technical talent from markets that are underrepresented in the US tech ecosystem. The University of Toronto, Waterloo, and the other strong Canadian research universities produce technical graduates at a quality level that is consistently underestimated in the US VC narrative.
What Founders Should Actually Do With This
Saim's advice to founders building in Toronto: lean into the financial services access rather than trying to replicate the Silicon Valley consumer tech playbook. Toronto-based fintech companies have a customer development advantage in their own backyard that would cost significant time and capital to build if they were starting in San Francisco. That advantage should be the center of the go-to-market strategy, not an afterthought.
"Toronto does not need to compete with Silicon Valley. It needs to be the best version of itself, and right now that version is quite good."