Stripe’s valuation may have been slashed in half this year, but the new head of Canadian operations for the Bay Area-based fintech giant is optimistic about its future north of the border.

“There is almost more opportunity in the Canadian market than we can go after right now,” Matt Burlak said in an interview with The Logic. Burlak, who joined Stripe at the start of 2022 from an enterprise sales role in Google’s Cloud division, has been overseeing the payment processor’s strategy in Canada since Jim Lambe, Stripe’s first general manager for the country, left in April  for an executive role at NetApp. 

Stripe raised over US$6.5 billion in a Series I in March, but its valuation in the round dropped to US$50 billion from US$95 billion in its last round in early 2021. In a release, the company said it would use the money to help employees sell their shares, and to pay tax liabilities. A month later, Irish co-founders Patrick and John Collision wrote in an annual community letter that, despite processing more than US$817 billion in total payments volume in 2022, the company faced “significant deceleration from the breakneck growth that [it] saw during 2020 and 2021.”

In Canada, Stripe has already acquired customers like Montreal-based Lightspeed, Edmonton’s Jobber and Ottawa-based Shopify—which also holds a lucrative stake in the fintech. Burlak said Stripe doesn’t disclose its revenue and payments volume by region, but added that he foresees “rapid adoption and rapid growth in the coming years,” in Canada. The company is looking to attract businesses here frustrated with the legacy technology they use for payments, or with their overall money movement infrastructure—especially those that use more than a single system. 

Companies are struggling to launch new business models, scale globally and integrate new products into their platforms or marketplaces, while engineers and product professionals don’t want to interact with outdated tools, he said. “We see a lot of opportunity to do a better job there,” he said, including offering a better transaction experience for customers.  

While Stripe has a reputation for serving startups and platform businesses, Burlak said the company has lately been attracting large enterprise companies in traditional industries ranging from fast-food to telecom. “These enterprise businesses are trying to figure out ways where they can be innovative as well,” he said. He wouldn’t name any, but said the company has announcements coming soon.

The fintech still plans to introduce some banking-as-a-service features in Canada, something Lambe first told The Logic was a goal in October of last year. Select Canadian companies already have access to certain banking service products, Burlak said—like Shopify, which in July launched a business credit card for merchants that’s powered by Stripe. 

Stripe currently has one Canadian office in Toronto as well as remote workers across the country. While the company has made a number of layoffs over the last year—cutting 1,120 employees from its global workforce of 8,000 in November 2022, and more recently a few dozen staff from its human resources department in late June—Burlak said he plans to grow the team in Canada.