Building payments for everyone: why Verizon chose Helcim

A milestone for Helcim

Today is a milestone moment for Helcim, and one I’m incredibly proud to share. We have partnered with Verizon to become the first payments provider on their new Business Marketplace, bringing our platform to millions of entrepreneurs across the United States.

Our Verizon deal is a profound validation of a philosophy that has guided us since day one; choosing the harder path.

From our earliest days, the advice from the investor world was nearly universal: “go niche.” We were told to use the now common startup playbook: pick just one industry and build the most vertical product for them. But this approach never felt right to us. We believed that the biggest opportunities lie in solving the hardest, most universal problems. And in the world of business, few problems are more universal (or more complex) than moving money and helping businesses get paid.

So we decided to embrace the complexity of being a horizontal provider and building something bigger.

Building for everyone

Building a payments company from scratch means you have to tackle a lot of things, all at once. It means building your own hardware while simultaneously deploying a seamless mobile and desktop software experience. It means navigating an endless maze of banking partnerships, card scheme rules, and ever-changing regulations. It is about meeting the demands of underwriting, blocking fraud, mastering machine learning, all while ensuring fanatical attention to compliance, security, and uptime. The list is endless, and the stakes are immense. This is the barrier to entry and what makes building a payments company so hard. So instead of going niche, we chose to build a payments engine that could power nearly everyone.

That meant creating an omni-channel platform that seamlessly blends in-person and online payments, not shying away from getting in the (hard) game of hardware. We also embraced the fact that our customers are complex and scaling businesses: the ambitious and growing owner-operators.

Our focus has never been on the freelancer or the pop-up shop. It has always been on the growing main-street businesses that are the true economic engines. The dentist expanding to a third location, the auto mechanic whose waiting room is filled with customers, the family-owned distributor operating a huge warehouse at the edge of town. Our core merchants have always been established businesses with complicated needs that require serious payment solutions without compromise.

Recognition through partnership

We’ve worked tirelessly to create serious payment solutions for them, and it's paying off. We landed in the top 50 of The Globe and Mail's 2025 list of Canada's Top Growing Companies with over 743% growth in the last three years, and we’re now proudly serving tens of thousands of merchants in over 800 industries.

Verizon recognized the breadth of our payment offering, and how well positioned we were to be a great potential provider for the 2 million business customers on their network. Great, enduring technology companies are built on broad platforms that solve fundamental problems. That has always been our belief.

The road ahead

Seeing this partnership with Verizon come to life is also a testament to the talent, dedication, and relentless spirit of our incredible team. Every one of them chose this harder path with us, and this achievement belongs to them.

We’re building an ambitious, world-class technology company right here in Canada, and we’ve got even bigger dreams to reach over the next 5 years.

-Nic