How’s this for innovation: Lower Rates. Better Tools. Amazing Service.

Helcim regularly tops the lists of the best payment companies in North America, and they got up there by relying on rare, old-fashioned (and, some might say, Calgarian) values.

"Our first contribution to the industry was bringing honesty and transparency,” says Rob Park, Helcim’s COO. “It has to be acknowledged that there are companies in this industry who do not clearly explain their services or list their fees in a straightforward way. We take a very different approach.”

REMOVING BARRIERS TO SUCCESS

The Helcim Payments platform is an online/in-person payment system that lets small and medium businesses manage credit card payments, customer relations, inventory, invoicing and online merchandising—at a reasonable price that is clearly explained and with exceptional customer service. The platform serves many different kinds of clients: software developers, contractors, online services, lawyers, doctors, restaurants, mom-and-pop shops of all kinds. Helcim’s goal was to build a system that lets these SMB clients do what they dream of without hiring programmers, without having to buy and learn many different kinds of technologies, and without paying a fortune. Today, Helcim services approximately 7000 clients across North America.

“Payments are awesome because they are the very heartbeat of commerce,” says Park. “At its core, business is about the exchange of value between parties. Every day, millions of small businesses exchange money for goods and services. As a payments company, we get to be at the very center of it all - we have a front row seat in helping small businesses succeed.” Today, that flow amounts to $3 billion in annual processing and 25 million annual transactions—all delivered with the Calgary company’s trademark personal touch.

Helcim takes pains to educate businesses on how its payments platform works so that they can clearly understand it and use it to its full capacity. Small businesses have a lot of things to do in a day, and Helcim tries to remove a few of the perpetually troublesome challenges that can stop a business in its tracks.

In fact, challenges are something Helcim itself is accustomed to overcoming. When it was founded in 2007, the fledgling Calgary-based payments company had trouble even finding a bank partner. (They ultimately partnered with a US-based bank as Canadian banks were uninterested and didn't offer similar pathways for partnership.) Not that any other part of the journey was particularly easy—the sheer number of regulations that a financial services company must negotiate complicated life almost constantly, and gave them an idea of what it’s like to be a customer of a financial services company.

PAYMENTS IN THE TIME OF PANDEMIC

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and people began ordering in rather than dining in, restaurants were faced with a dilemma: sign up for a delivery service—which meant losing money but keeping the lights on—or just stay closed? Margins in the restaurant industry are typically just 5-10% as it is, from which delivery services take 30%. “We offered a third way,” says Park. “Given that we actually want people to pick up, we asked ourselves how we could make that experience better for diners and restaurateurs alike.”

In response to the new conditions imposed by lockdown, Helcim put together an online ordering system in a month (you can see a demo on their updated website). They built and launched a version of their online store, just for restaurants, bringing menus online via their existing systems. For any sales made through this store, Helcim charged only their standard payment processing fees.

REINVENTING REVENUE

On June 1, 2020, Helcim launched the newest version of its payment system and website. Park reports that there’s been a 250% increase in new accounts since then—and if everything continues to go right, those new customers will notice a marked difference from the payment companies they may have dealt with in the past. Signup will be quick, accounts will activate right away, and dashboards will communicate useful information. What there won’t be? A clunky user experience; long, involved identification and authentication protocols; pages and pages of regulations and frameworks. . . and hand-off to a third-party bank with its own approach to customer service.

"For example, when a customer wanted to change their bank account under the old model, they'd have to fill out an eight page form, sign, scan and send to us. We'd have to pass on the bank's charge for completing the service" says Park. "A lot of us are familiar with big banks and that experience is pretty typical. With our new system, our customers get to update their info through our dashboard, there's no fee, and changes are reflected nearly instantaneously."

The bank is still there—all payment processors must work with those gatekeepers. Helcim, however, has negotiated a remarkable new deal with the bank that first took a chance on them more than a decade ago. "We’ve realigned the fee structure so that our banking partner makes money in a different way. Ultimately, the bank’s reward is scale driven by our innovation,” says Park.

Park emphasizes that it is extremely rare that a payment company should find its way to this level of autonomy. It took Helcim two years of negotiating with its bank to get agreements in place to operate in this new way, and involved a huge amount of coding work, from fraud detection to funding systems and bank account management.

Park says that the partner bank was willing to get creative in this way thanks to a decade-long relationship characterized by transparency, success and humanity. “That’s how we arrived at a place where we can take the next big leap into the future together.”

MADE IN-HOUSE

Helcim builds every component of its system—onboarding, verification, analysis, fraud detection, CRM, etc.—from scratch. This adds to the time it takes to build out functionality, but the upside is that the company doesn’t have to deal with third parties, they get exactly what they want and need, and they own their environments. That means they can do unique and useful things without having to get permission or signoff. For example, Helcim’s fraud detection functionality is home-built to look for specific patterns and to access the data in their own unique system; if they start to notice troubling patterns, they can react and adjust on the fly. "Building things ourselves allows our team to learn new things and build expertise in-house, here in Calgary - rather than outsourcing work and revenue to companies elsewhere."

THE HELCIM EXPERIENCE

Helcim is constantly reiterating its platform and services to be more transparent and simpler to use. After two years of development, the latest version launched on June 1, 2020, and sees Helcim evolve from a reseller with some proprietary software into a more independent financial services company.

“We’ve now created the same operating framework as our competitors Stripe, Square and PayPal. We can make our own decisions about underwriting and loss functions, which we, and not our partner bank, now control. That means we can feature an instant signup process, rather than a three-day process.

Onboarding is much simpler, and we can curate our service accounts. The big result is that we can now offer Helcim’s signature user experience—simple, friendly and efficient—across the entire customer relationship.” — Rob Park, Helcim COO

MAKE A FRIEND IN 5 MINUTES

“We’ve cultivated a great Customer Service team,” says Park. That’s because Helcim puts human beings front and centre in the customer experience. Have a question? Call a person who will help you. You won’t spend 15 minutes negotiating the “Press 2” phone maze that characterizes most banking situations these days. “We don’t force you to self-serve, although you can do that if you want to. Our reps will find your account fast, and stay with you until the problem is fixed.” Helcim customer service representatives are not promoted or rewarded based on how quickly they can get a customer off the phone, and the only reason the company tracks the time reps spend helping customers, is to determine whether workloads are out of hand. Helcim’s approach to customer service, says Park, is to “make a friend in five minutes. We want our representatives to get to know the customer and actually solve their problem the first time. It’s old fashioned. In a good way.”

It might also be the reason that Helcim’s customer base is exceedingly loyal, with many relationships lasting 8-9 years already—which is definitely not typical as far as processing companies can go.

“We want to be an anchor for Calgary’s brilliant tech community.”

— Rob Park, COO

THE BEST AND BRIGHTEST

Helcim maintains strong relationships with the University of Calgary, SAIT and Mount Royal University, and is bringing fresh talent from those institutions to the company, giving back via time spent and an open door. “We are keenly focused on attracting the best, the brightest, the most talented. And we find them right here, at our post-secondary institutions. That’s the keystone to any tech ecosystem,” says Park.

He notes that he sometimes hears complaints about a lack of seasoned developers in Calgary, but Helcim has not found that to be the case. “We’ve done really well at getting fresh people out of the different programs and training them from scratch,” he says. He points to the city’s deep pool of skilled and resilient people willing to learn, and also observes that people from elsewhere are happy to move here because of the quality of life and affordable cost of living.

Park believes that tech needs to be visible in the classroom, because people won’t pursue tech skills if they don’t see a future for it here in Calgary. “We go on campus and talk to classes, participate in lectures, offer background into our industry and the types of jobs that are available, and go to career fairs.” Recently, Park and Helcim’s in-house counsel participated in a class on fintech law at the University of Calgary, taking law students through the issues the company experiences regularly and sharing the excitement of the industry.

“We try to make the tech community exciting and welcoming through our actions,” says Park. “Because tech is part of all the city’s other industries; it falls on us to usher them into their next evolution.”

Helcim works hard to encourage this evolution at the individual level. Company representatives have given talks and presentations for EvolveU’s Full Stack Developer program, a full-time 6-month course housed in the Central Library that helps people gain in-demand developer skills, network and future-proof their careers. Helcim wound up hiring an EvolveU participant; another teammate came from the University of Calgary’s Master of Software Engineering intensive that teaches engineers of all stripes to become software engineers.

What they’re looking for in a potential new colleague: versatility, a work-ethic and a desire to be part of a (happy) team. “We’re a company of 75 doing the work of a company of 250,” says Park.

WHAT’S NEXT

“We want to be an anchor for Calgary's brilliant tech community,” says Park. “We want to be Calgary’s Square. We believe in this city and want to contribute to its growth and evolution.” The company anticipates a staff of 500, headquartered in Calgary, with a global presence. The team has grown from 3 to 75 people in the past four years and has aggressive growth plans for the future.

“Payments might not seem exciting at first glance, but it's a fascinating business,” says Park, “it constantly evolves and everything in business is connected by payments. It gives us a unique view on what's happening in the parts of the world we touch and an opportunity to help advance the engine of our community - small and medium sized businesses."

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HELCIM: Fintech that’s old-fashioned—In a good way