Hot after Helcim announced a monster funding round, I sat down with Nic Beique, Founder and CEO. Helcim has done some amazing things in the world of payment processing, and Nic was a real pleasure to chat with. We talked about how a startup goes about building a physical product, his history of creating and how that's influenced their design strategy, and what Calgary has to offer. Find out more about what they have going for them at their website and their LinkedIn.
Helcim is the easy and affordable solution for small and medium businesses accepting credit card payments in-person or online.
Who is Nic?
I was born in Texas and grew up in Montreal. I moved to Calgary in my teens and learned English. I am also a self-taught computer programmer. I always was entrepreneurial, I started a bunch of businesses, with my first was at the age of 16 doing programming for e-commerce websites. I got a front-row seat to what small businesses were doing and I fell in love with the small business journey. I ended up falling in love with payments as well – I know not a lot of people say that, but you get to be the heartbeat of commerce. People say payments don’t seem super exciting, but I get to work with all these super cool businesses that all need payments. I felt like I was always in a privileged position to mix all these things, and here I am today.
Why payments?
With payments, you’re in between the customer and business in a position of super high trust. It’s tough business because the expectation is so high, it’s one thing to build software, but it’s a whole other to move people’s money. It has to be secure with no outages. There’s no patience for screwing up, but if you can do it right it’s a real position of privilege. What’s amazing about payments is that they are a must-have; a company will turn off the lights before they turn off the payment machine, you simply can’t run a business without it. So we don’t have to convince businesses they need to accept payments, we just need to deliver them faster, with the right pricing, with the right customer service and the right technology. It’s a high bar as there are a lot of big players in the field with a big barrier to entry, but it’s something that every business has to have.
How do the actual transactions work?
High level, the credit card industry has two sides, the issuing side that issues credit cards to customers - these are mostly banks giving out credit cards and working with Visa and Mastercard. The other side is the acquiring side, but let’s call it the processing side. That’s where Helcim is. Our job is to authorize the transaction and deposit it to the merchant’s bank account really fast. Our job is to make sure that when you walk up to a sushi restaurant and tap your card, everything happens seamlessly.
Every business will have its own specialty or strength in terms of where they operate. One of our specialties is healthcare such as dentist offices, vets, chiros, optometrists, and a lot of professional services too. It’s so easy as a consumer to think of payments and think of the coffee shop, and yes coffee shops need payments too, but the dentist, the plumbing store, the auto mechanic next door, and the lumber yard all need payments specifically for them. To give you a crazy stat, Square is huge and they’ve been around for 14 years or so, but they only have approximately 2% of the U.S. payment volume. It’s a huge company with a huge market cap, publicly traded, but you realize they're still tiny compared to the size of the market. There are trillions of dollars moving around.
So how is the other 98% divided?
You have fintech, Square, PayPal, Ayden and others. And you have about a dozen legacy processors like Moneris, TD, First Data, Global Payments other others. Some industries are a bit of a winner-take-all, but payments is just too big for one company.
Does that make it easier for you to come in?
There are tradeoffs; and you have to find yourself a wedge or a specialty. We do really well in healthcare, professional services, and wholesale so that gives us an advantage. The downside is that competitors are so, so big. - you’re talking about 30–50-billion-dollar market caps, massive companies with massive capabilities. You’re competing with some pretty big giants with some pretty big toes, and you’re trying not to get yours squished, but that’s part of the fun.
Back at the restaurant I worked at, for example, if a terminal went missing it was a disaster because all the transactions were stored on the terminal. How have y’all improved on these somewhat outdated machines?
That’s the old-school, legacy way. Our machines, called smart terminals or cloud-based terminals, you can throw them in the garbage, boot up a new one, log in, and all your transactions are still there. The old terminals used to hold the credit card information for the whole day, and the problem was that if you wanted to refund a payment, you had to go find which machine you did it on. Everything we do is cloud-based now, you can see everything wherever.
When you’re coming in as a startup and looking at what’s wrong with the legacy machines, you can improve on them much more quickly.
From the perspective of building technology from the ground up, Helcim’s day one is twenty years later than the day one of legacy processors. We’re using cloud as a default, web-based applications as a default, and mobile as a default, and we’re leveraging that. Now, over time everyone becomes legacy. In a decade or two, someone will be cutting edge and we’ll be legacy.
I see our size as a startup as a strength as we get to move really fast. The reality is a lot of legacy processors are no longer technology companies at heart. They move really slowly, innovation becomes hard, and they become risk-averse. We might now have the same resources or distribution that they do, but you have speed and the latest tech on your side.
What was the process like for building a physical product?
We’ve partnered with a manufacturer in Taiwan, although we went through a couple different iterations and a couple different manufacturers to get to where we are today. Our previous generation of credit card readers got us to where we are, but it was a stepping stone to get us here. One of our previous manufacturers got acquired by Stripe and we got kicked out. That was a big lesson we learned - the need to have a stronger relationship with your manufacturing partner. So with our new manufacturer, we spent a lot of time in Taiwan with them developing that partnership.
Bringing a payment terminal to market typically takes about two years and costs at least 5 to 10 million dollars in investments. Maybe that’s why a lot of tech companies won’t focus on the in-person payments, and instead will only do online payments. But online payments only account for about 20% of all payments, the rest are in-person so here still is very much a physical component. At Helcim we do both and we do both of them well - we felt that having a good in-person way to process payments was a good way to develop relationships with our merchants. If we’re going to service the local vet and you don’t have the physical product then we’re not going to get all of their business. We have to make the investment in physical products to make that happen.
What does making that initial investment for the physical product look like?
You have to be a little crazy. Helcim has had an interesting path, the first iteration of our company was way different then now, but it allowed us to build a company of a certain size with decent resources that allowed us to go and make a crazy pivot from being a reseller of merchant services to being our own processor. We started that journey bootstrapped. The reality is that trying to build a payment processor from scratch is nearly impossible. If you go to an venture investor asking for 20 million dollars and 4 to 5 years to build this huge, waterfall project, that’s a very, very hard thing to convince an investor to get along with. We knew that, so instead we used our original reseller business to essentially be our own seed investors and spent years towards this big pivot. We officially launched as our own processor in the summer of 2020. That’s when we knew we were ready to go because we had been making the investments over so many years. And from there our new service took off really quickly, and that’s when we were ready to go to outside investors. We did our Series-A two years ago. And a couple of months ago we did our Series B which we’re super excited about. But building a processor from scratch is just not fundable at an early stage so we had to take a different path.
Do you think that you’re able to bring in an international perspective from partnering with a manufacturer in Taiwan?
I haven’t traveled enough to notice a direct influence, so most of my experience as a business person as really been in Canada.
But Canada is funny because it’s such a monopolistic country in terms of banking and telecoms. Canada has so many things going for it, but it’s going to take a mindset change for us to realize the potential that we have as a country. As Canadians we’ve almost come to accept the monopolies and the poor service that they bring, and it’s almost like there’s a false narrative that somehow these monopolies keep the country stable. That’s a false dichotomy; we can have stability and competition, but we’re somehow stuck in the mindset of you need to trade one for the other. I think the U.S. is a great example of a country that embraces competition.
So why here?
First of all, Calgary is home. It’s an amazing city. Calgary is in a super rare sweet spot of a city where you have a good population size, one of the youngest populations in Canada, and one of the highest STEM concentrations in Canada. We’re cranking out a lot of STEM talent every year. So if you’re building something you get access to some really great people looking for opportunities. You have a great quality of life too in this city. I think the next decade or two of big economic growth comes from cities like this one because young people can afford to build lives and build businesses here.
I’ll also say we do plan on scaling in Calgary because we can service a bunch of different markets like the U.S. but have the CapEx cost in Canada which are typically lower, yet people still can have a super high quality of life. I think there’s a nice arbitrage of the Canadian Advantage. Ultimately, the end goal is to take the company public one day and become an anchor tenant of one of the many successful companies that came out of Calgary.
You also don’t have the same barriers of access and privilege that you see in the New York’s and the Toronto’s. Even in terms of accessibility of people and institutions, Calgary is super open. The reality is you're like one connection away from getting a door open to the next yes you need to build a business.
I’m looking around your office, are you a Star Wars or Lego guy?
I’m a huge Lego guy, I like Star Wars but really I’m a Lego fanatic. I grew up building Lego and I think the creation part had something to do with who I am now. If you walk around the office, you’ll see Lego bricks around. Everyone builds their own Lego statues. You can print your own bricks with achievements, whether you survived a crazy crunch week or dealt with a fire, you’ll get a brick to add to your statue. One of our four core values at Helcim is ‘We are builders’, and I think in a way that comes through with the Legos on everyone’s desk.
How do you go home and not go crazy with how much has been going on the past few years?
I’m not a big believer in work life balance. While it's important to take time for yourself, but ultimately you have to love what you do. I think it’s more integrating what you love into the workplace. One way I think about it is how do I make every day feel like a full day in a cycle that I look forward to repeating.
Do you read much?
Yes. I’m going through Setting the Table by Danny Meyer right now - it’s about a restaurateur who built amazing customer service organizations. I used to read more fiction, fantasy, and sci-fi, but I have less time for it now. Now it’s books on strategy and a lot of biographies too..
What is something you would pass on to someone who may be in a position you were in the past?
My main advice for new entrepreneurs is for them to network, outreach, and find peer groups. I regret building the foundation of this business too much in isolation - in a cave. I didn’t start networking until about 5 years ago, and I regret it. I’m so thankful for the people I have around now, I feel like I’m not alone anymore, and I wish I had that much earlier. I think I was self-conscious, thinking my business wasn’t big enough or I hadn’t done enough, but it was silly. I could’ve had supporters and mentors and cheerleaders so much earlier, and it would’ve made such a difference. It doesn’t matter if you’re just starting out, you just need to interact with this city and the amazing people in it. It’s never too early. It’s a city that will say yes and opens doors for you.
Thank you to Nic once again for making this happen, I'm super grateful. Long Calgary.
Writer and Photographer | Sam Doty
