Calgary-based payments company Helcim has secured a strategic agreement with US telecom giant Verizon.
The deal will see Helcim become the first payments provider embedded in Verizon’s new business marketplace, giving the Canadian firm a significant new channel to grow south of the border.
The move is a major test of Helcim’s long-standing strategy of building a broad, horizontal platform. This approach runs counter to the prevailing venture-backed trend of verticalization, where fintechs target specific industries like restaurants or construction. Helcim, in contrast, has built a single, unified merchant system designed to serve a wide array of businesses, from dental clinics to B2B distributors.
For Verizon, the partnership is part of a broader strategy among telecommunication firms to increase customer stickiness and average revenue per user by bundling essential business software with their core connectivity products. To do that effectively, Verizon needed a payments partner that could cater to its entire, diverse SMB customer base—not just a fraction of it.
“We’ve always chosen the harder path, because we believe solving complex, universal problems is the only way to build giant, lasting technology businesses,” Helcim founder and CEO Nic Beique said in an interview with Fintech.ca. “We built a payments platform that could handle the complexity of any business type, and Verizon realized how well that complimented the 2 million businesses they serve.”
This strategy has required Helcim to tackle challenges that many software-focused FinTechs avoid, including developing its own point-of-sale hardware, like its recently launched second generation Smart Terminal.
The Verizon deal comes as Helcim has seen significant growth. The company, which now employs 150 people in Calgary, reported 743 percent three-year revenue growth, landing it on The Globe and Mail’s 2025 list of Canada’s Top Growing Companies. While Helcim declined to disclose its revenue, the Globe’s list indicated the company surpassed $50 million by the end of 2024.
The Verizon partnership provides a powerful new distribution channel, but it also places Helcim in more direct competition with established players like Stripe and Square as it scales.
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