Made in Canada: A startup is transforming how people move their money - Toronto Star

Gharsa Amin was inspired to launch Kadovax, an international money transfer platform, after experiencing first hand how frustrating the conventional system is.

In this series, we explore how Canadian businesses are contending with a shifting trade landscape.

When Gharsa Amin’s grandmother fell ill in Germany, Amin thought that sending her money from Canada would be quick and easy. Instead, it was an arduous, time-consuming process, requiring a frustrating amount of paperwork.

Amin had spent years working in compliance, trading, cybersecurity and engineering. But watching those funds get stuck in limbo pushed her to start a company that would help modernize cross-border payments. In April, 2025, just four months after her grandmother got sick, Amin launched Kavodax.

Using blockchain and a Canadian-dollar-backed stablecoin, Kavodax moves money all around the world, with faster transfer times and lower foreign exchange fees than traditional institutions. The company is registered as a money services business with FINTRAC, meeting Canada’s anti-money-laundering and counter-terrorist-financing requirements, and a payment service provider with the Bank of Canada. Less than a year after its founding, Kavodax now operates in more than 50 countries.

We talked to Amin about the limitations of 20th-century banking, her bet on decentralization and what it takes to build a global fintech in Canada.

I started working in digital banking at a very early age. Then I moved to Canada from the U.S. in 2021, and worked in compliance, trading, cybersecurity, even engineering and software development. I realized the entire financial system relied on back end systems that were designed in the ‘90s. This became obvious when I was sending money to my grandmother. I heard similar frustrations from my founder friends who couldn’t send money globally cheaply or had to use three separate tools to pay their staff.

I thought, “How could technology actually automate things, make it better, faster, cheaper?” I realized there was a real opportunity in the payments space, and real gaps I could address.

My grandmother doesn’t understand tools like Wise, PayPal or Stripe. She just has her bank account. We’re her only close family besides my mom, who was in Canada, so she was alone there.

When she got sick, we tried to wire her money, but she had to go to the bank in person to receive it, and no one could do it on her behalf. That was a huge problem, as she had to be hospitalized and needed the money within a day.

But the money took about five days to move, with multiple clearances required. There was also a certain threshold on how much you could send per day. And the foreign exchange fee was around 3 to 4 per cent, which we didn’t even care about at that point, since speed was all that mattered, and speed just wasn’t possible.

Real-time payment rails, open banking, stablecoins, tokenization, intra-key transfer systems — and how different provinces are adopting them — all come together with a lot of friction, and that matters for building a financial system that can work globally. Right now they’re all in silos, and we need to bring them together to solve the bigger problem of sending money nationally and internationally.  

That’s something very dear to my heart. Around a billion people around the world have been excluded from banking and financial services. For the most part, these are in underserved markets and developing economies, and often include people who have been traditionally underserved, like women and elderly people.

When you have access to the banking space, you can start a lot of things. As a small-business owner in, say, the Philippines, imagine not having a bank account you can use to receive money or send money to your customers. In countries with currency volatility, people want access to the Canadian dollar or U.S. dollar to get paid in those currencies. So we’re creating an incredible opportunity for wealth and inclusion.

The businesses working with us are mostly small to medium-sized, doing $500,000 to $3 million in transaction volume, dealing with different currencies and settling in local currencies in different geographies. They can’t afford to lose 3, 4 or 5 per cent on foreign exchange conversion. They also don’t want their payments stuck in limbo for days at a time.

With us, you can send money from your bank and receive it back all in one platform, with a transaction fee of less than 0.1 per cent at times.

I think Ottawa is doing a great job regulating stablecoins, and more institutional players are adopting them as a result. That means more regulatory clarity, which builds trust with end users — their data is protected, and their money will be there when we say it will be.

We need regulatory clarity and strong legal policies to do things the right way without hindering innovation. There has to be a balance; you can protect consumers and regulate decentralized finance in a way that works for everyone.

In the beginning, building trust and credibility with bigger institutions was a challenge. That was key to going global and working with more established fintech companies in other parts of the world. That’s why we focused on building strong compliance policies and procedures and getting our licenses. A Payment Service Provider license isn’t easy to get; it takes real policies, procedures and practices, not just paperwork.

Some of the best Waterloo engineers are here, helping us build our platform. We have so much strength in R&D that you probably couldn’t find elsewhere. The competition is there, but it’s not too stifling, and that gives us opportunities, too. I really want to build something great in this country, as Canada has given me so much since I immigrated here, and we will stay here and build a business globally from here. I see Canada as an opportunity, not an obstacle.

My goal isn’t just to be the next unicorn or process a trillion dollars. For me, the most important part will be looking back in 10 or 15 years and being able to say that we brought 500,000 people into the financial system who were otherwise previously excluded, or that we saved $2 to $3 billion for businesses. Those are the impacts I’d love to see.

Srivindhya Kolluru writes about technology for MaRS. Torstar, the parent company of the Toronto Star, has partnered with MaRS to highlight innovation in Canadian companies.