TD Ventures — strengthening the bank via the world’s best entrepreneurs
NASA is one of the most incredible organisations the world has ever seen. A pioneer in space exploration, achieving JFK’s impossible moon shot in the late ’60s, the space agency has made astounding leaps for all of humanity.
And then, out of seemingly nowhere, came a little company called SpaceX. Without any of the resourcing or talent from NASA, SpaceX has developed its own rockets, come up with brilliant innovation, and in doing so, cut the cost of rocket launches by 300%.
The ingenuity and the passion of an entrepreneur can be amazingly powerful. These traits can also be incredibly valuable to incumbent businesses. SpaceX has been a boon for NASA, making rocketry far cheaper, recapturing a lost interest in space travel, and propelling space exploration forward.
The same sort of spirit that lead SpaceX to tackle hard problems has spilled into the financial sector. Hundreds of new companies have entered the market to make banking better, to offer new services and to innovate — all striving to create the next big evolution in banking.
We welcome that passion and ingenuity to build new products and services that will captivate and delight our customers. But they operate differently than giant tech corporations. This is why we established a TD Ventures team, a group dedicated to finding and working with entrepreneurs that can help us build the bank of the future.
How we’re making start-up partnerships work at TD
Most small companies that want to change banking don’t have anywhere near our resources — our capital, our customer base, our commitment to excellence. They often have a different idea, a new approach and are prepared to do anything to make it work. TD Ventures finds, evaluates, invests and supports the partnering of small entrepreneurial businesses within our larger organization.
We start with a TD business problem and then look for a fintech that might solve this in a different way. We found from the earliest days that the other direction doesn’t work — it’s very challenging to start with a great concept and try to force-fit it into a TD problem.
Finding a good company comes from research, paying attention to the world, and partner insights. We also hold Collision Days — kind of like speed dating between startups and the bank — where we propose a problem to the start-up community and put a half dozen select start-ups in front of an executive panel of decision makers to quickly assess their viability and potential to engage in a project or POC.
Once we find a good potential match, we mentor the start-up, and Sherpa them through our processes — which we’ve worked with our Risk partners to adjust to a startup community. At times, where it’s the right fit, we take minority investments in select companies, and look for opportunities to donate legal work to help them protect their IP.
How’s it been progressing? Pretty well. Our team has spoken to well over 1,000 start-ups, run five collision days, taken investments in eight start-ups, and are close to launching two new revenue businesses in Canada this year. Not to mention, we’ve had three start-ups take us up on our patent support.
We have to do more though; the entrepreneurial activity in Canada is just exploding, and our efforts to date have been small scale. After a number of years, we’ve worked out the most important thing we can do to keep the bank safe and to give TD access to exciting new ideas is to make these fledgling businesses successful. We need to cultivate and curate the small to build capabilities that we can share with all our customers. That’s one way we’ll build the bank of the future.
