As Canadian companies navigate an increasingly complex financial landscape, the demand for trusted, modern finance automation tools is on the rise.
Enter Tipalti, the AI-powered platform simplifying everything from accounts payable and global payouts to compliance and treasury management. With offices in Vancouver and Toronto and FINTRAC registration as a money services business, Tipalti is investing heavily in Canada.
Chief Revenue Officer Sam Barakat, a seasoned SaaS executive who previously built Blackline’s mid-market business from the ground up, explains in this interview why Tipalti is betting big on Canada, the signals that finance teams need to modernize, and how AI is transforming the future of payments.
What exactly is finance automation? Can you tell us what Tipalti does?
SB: Essentially, finance automation is all about automating routine operations to streamline time-consuming financial team workflows, making it easier for finance teams to focus on other strategic business priorities. But, with the complexity of the global economy today, finance automation has evolved to be much more. It also involves helping businesses modernize their overall finance operations, mitigate potential risk, and make better financial decisions so that they can scale faster and smarter.
As the AI-powered platform for finance automation, Tipalti elevates how finance teams operate by removing the complexities of doing global business and accelerating their finance operations efficiency. Our platform provides a comprehensive suite of finance automation solutions designed for mid-market businesses across accounts payable, global payouts, procurement, corporate cards, employee expenses, supplier management, tax compliance, and treasury.
What drove Tipalti to expand into the Canadian market?
SB: In a nutshell, the time was right for Tipalti and for our Canadian customers and partners. We’re seeing a growing need from Canadian businesses looking for finance automation tools to help their business scale and navigate a dynamic economic landscape. I frequently hear from our regional customers that manual workflows are holding them back from strategic work, and they are losing productivity because of these inefficiencies.
With our Canada-headquartered customers needing local solutions to meet their unique finance operations needs, we knew it was the right time to further invest in supporting them. That’s why our FINTRAC (Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada) registration as a money services business (MSB) is so important. This license certification means businesses in Canada can trust Tipalti.
MSBs are legally recognized as financial institutions and are subject to specific regulations, including anti-money laundering (AML) requirements. It enables us to offer valuable regional-specific features like EFT support and local funding accounts, to simplify existing supplier payment workflows, reduce friction, and empower businesses to achieve greater scalability. Working as a company in Canada means doing business the way Canadians do business. Today, we have a significant number of employees in Canada, as well as two major offices in Vancouver and Toronto.
What are the key indicators that a company needs to modernize its financial operations? What signs should they be watching for?
SB: There are several signs companies should be looking out for that become increasingly significant as they scale and grow.
1) When a finance team spends more time on manual tasks than on strategic planning, this starts to create inefficiencies. Finance leaders may notice excessive time spent on data entry, chasing approvals, or reconciling accounts manually – activities that could be automated to redirect talent toward growth initiatives.
2) Often during rapid expansion or global growth, risk and compliance become top concerns. If there is an increase in potential risk or a need to ensure new types of compliance, this may mean a business needs to plan differently for future scale. If companies are experiencing more payment errors or difficulty maintaining proper controls across growing operations, these are signals that their current systems can’t scale with the company’s ambitions.
3) Lacking real-time insights into cash flow or the inability to make efficient and cost-effective cross-border transactions can significantly impact a business. Making crucial decisions with incomplete information, such as real-time cash flow insights, or being unable to effectively manage complex cross-border payments can severely hamper business growth.
4) An increase in operational friction is also quite telling. When adding new suppliers, entering new markets, or establishing new entities becomes complex, rather than strategically enabling, financial infrastructure is holding the company back.
Companies are increasingly operating on a global scale. What challenges does this create for finance teams, and how is tech like Tipalti helping address these?
SB: Doing global business or even paying across borders adds a whole new layer of complexity. Although there is a significant opportunity in going global, new challenges mean that future ambitions are often outpaced by the ability to gain control over finance operations.
Tipalti has always focused on elevating how finance teams operate in the global economy. We understand what global means. Suddenly, the finance team is juggling multiple currencies, banking systems, and payment methods across different countries, each with its own tax rules and compliance requirements. Also, visibility becomes a real headache when dealing with different entities, currencies, and time zones all at once. It can be incredibly difficult to get a clear picture of spending and cash flow. The same goes for risk exposure, which jumps significantly too. For example, international payments often face higher fraud risks and need thorough compliance checks.
Tipalti tackles these challenges head-on. Our platform provides a comprehensive suite of finance automation solutions tailored to our customers’ needs. We enable global companies to efficiently and securely pay millions of suppliers and payees across 200+ countries and territories, in 120 currencies. We ensure global expansion becomes an opportunity rather than a bottleneck.
How does Tipalti approach regional market differences when serving Canadian companies?
SB: We are a global company, which means we understand how to build products that serve businesses in multiple countries. Every country has unique regulatory and finance operations needs, and we make sure to address those needs when we work with businesses in a particular market.
In Canada, this goes beyond country differences to regional differences across provinces. From BC to Newfoundland, there are a variety of sectors and businesses that cannot be handled with a one-size-fits-all approach. However, one thing they all have in common is the need to modernize their financial operations so they can focus on their business.
What is the current state of fintech and payments in Canada and how do you see it evolving in the next few years? How do you see trends like the evolution of AI and ML impacting these industries?
SB: The current state of fintech and the overall adoption of payments is unique in Canada. Historically, it has been very mobile-friendly and open to innovative technology. When it comes to fintech there is a valued trusting relationship of banks which has shaped the evolution of fintech across Canada. Trust and innovation go hand in hand and doing business here means understanding this intimately. This is another reason why our FINTRAC registration is so important to us; it demonstrates our commitment to building that trust with Canadian businesses.
Like many other countries, businesses across Canada see the massive opportunity with AI, specifically in partnership with regulation. In fact, the Canadian government has already made moves with investments that support the responsible development and adoption of AI across the Canadian economy.
The blend of the approach to innovation with a desire for trusted technology from businesses means there’s a significant opportunity for AI’s impact. AI can power significant outcomes for businesses, especially in finance automation.
Every company has its unique culture and values. What defines Tipalti’s culture, and how does this influence your approach to serving customers?
SB: At Tipalti our company values are written on the wall, but our culture is not. Our culture is natural and has been built from within and shaped by the passion and dedication to excellence from our teams across the globe. We hire, promote and celebrate our culture and our values which reflect our ambitions to serve our customers at the highest level.
When you are a fast-growing company doing business across many types of customer sectors, across many different countries and regions in those countries, culture acts as a unifying function for how we show up for our customers and partners each day. We embrace a customer-first mindset, starting with the very first customer engagement, all the way through to onboarding and supporting our customers at the highest level.
Beyond our customer-first mindset, we look to hire top talent in the fintech space. In every country we serve, we firmly believe in driving strong career opportunities for our team. Across Tipalti we also encourage a bias for meaningful action and decisions. Given that we operate in a global economy that is highly dynamic, we encourage brave and quick decisions and we optimize and adapt constantly in all parts of our business. All of this goes hand-in-hand with an open and diverse culture that serves our Canadian and global customers.
What’s next for Tipalti, both in Canada and globally? In one year? In five years?
SB: Since opening our offices in Canada—Vancouver in 2020, followed by Toronto in 2022—we’ve remained deeply committed to supporting our regional customers, as seen with our FINTRAC registration and localized solution. Looking ahead, we see ourselves as a trusted partner for Canada’s fastest-growing businesses, and we will continue to build upon our commitment.
On a global scale, we’ll continue investing in our product and our people to help customers scale their businesses with modernized finance operations.
We recently announced that Tipalti surpassed $200 million in annual recurring revenue and continues to deliver consistent year-over-year (YoY) expansion, growing our customer base by 30%. In addition, we secured $200 million in growth financing from long-time partner Hercules Capital, Inc. These milestones showcase our sustained future momentum, expanding global footprint, and leadership in AI-powered finance automation.
We also recently rolled out the next evolution of Tipalti AI, redesigned with an agentic focus in mind. It is enhanced with more powerful, context-aware AI agents, meaning that we have expanded both the breadth and depth of our AI capabilities. Embedded across the full spectrum of our finance automation solutions, Tipalti AI enables finance teams to increase productivity, surface richer insights, and focus their time on strategic priorities.
In the future, we will continue to create more AI agents to take on additional manual and repetitive tasks, but also to help finance teams with strategic tasks such as closing the books even faster or generating real-time insights on business spend in new and impactful ways.
We aim to redefine what’s possible in finance by empowering finance professionals to achieve a level of productivity never seen before.
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