I loved hockey cards growing up. When I was 14, I started flipping them—buying and reselling them to friends and other people I knew. It was a fun way to make money and it got me interested in sales. When I graduated high school, I decided to study at Concordia University’s John Molson School of Business in Montreal. A month after graduating, I entered the corporate world and landed myself a 9 to 5 job at Salesforce to complete a business development apprenticeship. 

My day-to-day wasn’t what I anticipated. I was asked to prepare countless slide deck presentations and spreadsheets loaded with data—all of which, to me, weren’t related to the actual sales process that I’d fallen in love with. I left and worked several short-term jobs while I figured out what I wanted to do next. I took a sales job at Flinks, a financial technology company that helped users access financial data and safely connect that information between apps. Flinks was an early-stage startup at the time, so the job offered me a lot more autonomy than I’d had before. For me, that translated into an opportunity to drive meaningful results.

Speaking with clients about their pain points was part of my job at Flinks. I gained a lot of knowledge about their needs and what they were dissatisfied with to determine how Flinks could solve those. It turned out no Canadian company offered a platform that integrated Flink’s open banking—the sharing of financial data between banks and third-parties—and instant payments. Many of Flinks’ clients expressed an interest in such a platform if the company were to build it. I presented the idea to my team as means of growing our product line, while also addressing a gap in the market.

Ultimately, my supervisors said they weren’t interested in going into payments at the time. But I was so passionate about building what I pitched that I sent in my resignation. Confident in the knowledge that there was a market need for what I wanted to build, I launched Zūm Rails. 

There’s a lot that goes into moving money from one place to another — be it transaction processing, risk management, data aggregation, banking-as-a-service, billing, or subscriptions. Whereas the majority of fintech companies provide only one of these functions, Zūm Rails’ platform allows companies to integrate their payments, banking and all other financial operations into a single online portal that doesn’t rely on an excessive number of third-party providers. 

By giving businesses one place to manage all of the operations that go into money management, we take the administrative headache out of processing payments and other financial processes. Our platform also makes it possible for companies to choose the most efficient payment option for their customers. For instance, a business might be fine with three-day processing for some payments but need to process others in real-time. 

When I started Zūm Rails, I was cold calling potential clients, trying to get meetings with the right people and explaining to them how our product could help them simplify their financial operations and optimize their transactions. Today we work with companies of all sizes, from blue chip financial services companies like Visa and Mastercard, to companies like FairStone and Desjardins Group.

Many companies saw the value of joining our platform because it offered them the ability to not only process payments, but facilitate all of their financial interactions including onboarding, risk mitigation, invoicing, and pulling and analyzing financial reports, in the most secure way possible. 

Today, over 500 companies use Zūm Rails’ platform. We’ve hired 75 new employees since we were founded, and in 2024, Zūm Rails tripled its sales over the previous year and hit a $100,000,000 valuation. We recently opened a secondary headquarters in Miami to expand our services to the United States.

Related: How an App Can Make Banking More Equitable for Indigenous Communities

Businesses that offer employees autonomy and the opportunity to grow are some of the best places to build a career. It’s for this reason that I always advise young professionals, aspiring entrepreneurs, or anyone else in the workforce to let their company know where they think they’ll shine the most, and work with them to get there—even if it’s not what they were initially hired to do.I believe that launching a startup or even just starting a new job will always come with some degree of uncertainty.But success is often directly tied to the acceptance that there’s never going to be a right moment or right way to get started.

—As told to Vartika Puranik