Canadian Digital Bank Neo Financial Nets $145.2M

Neo Financial, the Canada-based digital bank, has raised 185 million in Canadian dollars ($145 million) in a funding round, a report from The Bharat Express News said Thursday (May 5).

This comes as the bank got past the mark of 1 million customers.

Neo Financial offers several products such as cash back and savings. It also expanded its investments in April, including a private wealth management product and anticipates offering mortgages this year. Both were parts of the bank’s plan to be a “one stop shop” for every kind of financial service.

And Neo has boosted its number of partnerships, including various retailers like Hudson’s Bay, Home Depot, H&R Block, Boston Pizza, Goodfood and others. The goal is to help retailers looking for ways to modernize loyalty programs and finance offerings.

In addition, Neo has expanded its services to add co-branded cards, buy now, pay later (BNPL) options, installment financing point of sale and subscription loyalty services.

According to co-founder and CEO Andrew Chau, the bank was started to challenge the five big banks controlling around 90% of the country’s market share.

“[W]e have all the great products and features and seamlessly integrated experiences, which is actually not very common here in Canada because the regulatory market is different here. There are not 6,000 regional banks,” Chau told TBEN. “We built our entire financial infrastructure, our banking core, from scratch. And it really gave us that advantage of innovating quickly and generating a ton of product velocity.”

See also: Neo Financial’s $64M Series B Funding Will Speed Growth

PYMNTS wrote last year that Neo Financial had announced Valar Ventures had led its round for 64 million Canadian dollars. The round was used to grow Neo’s team in Calgary and Winnipeg, as well as rolling out more FinTech partnerships with retailers.

In 2020, Neo launched the Neo Card, which had no fees. That card let users earn 4% to 6% at partnering retailers and at least 1% for all spending.