Meet Venn: the fintech challenger taking on Canada's big banks

Founded by ex-Revolut leaders, Venn is the banking solution that serves over 5,000 Canadian businesses with multi-currency accounts, virtual cards, and invoicing.

As the last G7 country without open banking, Canada's fintech market is uniquely competitive. Venn's two-person growth team is navigating that landscape while growing 20-25% month-over-month, competing against the Big 5 banks, other venture-backed fintechs, and international players eyeing Canadian expansion.

Despite the imbalance in resources, Venn is outpacing those competitors in AI search:

A 2-person growth team up against 95% market share

Venn is climbing a steep mountain. Canada's Big 5 banks hold 95% market share with decades of brand trust behind them. Venture-backed fintechs have big marketing budgets. And international players like Brex and Ramp are gearing up to enter Canada. Meanwhile, Venn's growth team is made up of two people.

Initially, their organic growth motion involved outsourcing content to agencies. But agencies were not the force multiplier they were hoping for. Output was slow, revisions were constant, and the whole process ate just as much internal time as doing it themselves.

As Alex Rodmell, who leads Organic Growth & Partnerships at Venn, puts it: "You outsource this work to an agency to take it off your hands, and you actually spend doing the same amount of time on revisions back and forth."

AirOps changed the equation. Venn built a fully integrated content workflow, from keyword research to HTML-formatted publication, that cut production time from 2 hours to 10 minutes per article. Output scaled 5x in four months (60 to 300 articles). While competitor banks are still stuck in slow committee approvals, Venn's lean team was already publishing.

5x more content with higher-intent traffic

Scaling content fast usually means watching conversion metrics drop. That's a risk Venn couldn't take while competing for high-value business banking customers against trusted incumbents.

But when the data came in, LLM-sourced traffic actually converted faster than traditional search, with fewer sessions before signup. "LLM-sourced traffic has better time-to-conversions and sessions-to-conversions than organic traffic from Google," Alex notes. Users arriving through AI search tools already knew what they wanted and moved through the funnel faster.

Even after publishing 240 new articles in four months, lead quality stayed within +/-10% on 90-day revenue metrics. Venn didn't have to choose between volume and performance.

From "trust me" to strategic AI search analytics

After Venn’s rebrand exactly a year ago, organic traffic reset to zero. The team learned how to create content themselves, but scaling it properly meant coordinating far more than just writing.

As Shani Mithani, Head of Growth at Venn, puts it: “About a year ago we had just rebranded and were starting from zero. Our new site had no traffic, SEO & AEO was completely new, we had no way of tracking visibility, and agencies were taking too long to ship unoptimized content. We shifted to creating content ourselves and realized good content had many elements beyond the words. If we wanted to 10x the growth we were starting to see, we needed a system that handled SEO, AEO, content production, all of it. AirOps was the first platform that actually delivered results.”

Those systems didn’t just improve workflow. They showed clear, repeatable gains in visibility, traffic, and lead quality.

AirOps citation tracking replaced that guesswork with real data. The platform showed roughly 100% mention rate in business credit cards and flagged invoicing as an uncovered gap. Reporting went from "trust me" to "we've locked down this category, and here's where we're going next."

The data also made it easier to justify priorities to leadership. "I can prove why my time has gone to this last thing for two months," Alex explains, "and I can also give the strategy of, hey, I know this is going to work."

Recovered time feeds back into the growth loop

Cutting article production from 2 hours to 10 minutes didn't just mean more content. It freed Alex’s capacity to build attribution dashboards, run multi-channel experiments, and analyze which content categories were actually driving conversions.

As any scrappy team knows, agility and speed are the compounding advantage. Better data informs better content strategy, which drives more targeted output, which generates better data. The two-person team isn't just producing more; they're learning faster than competitors who are still waiting on agency turnarounds and committee approvals.

Results and impact

• 600% AirOps-attributed citation growth across ChatGPT, Google AI, and Gemini (roughly 200% in three months alone)
• ~100% mention rate in business credit cards, outperforming Canada's Big 5 banks
• 50% month-over-month LLM traffic growth
• 150% organic traffic increase over three months
• 5x content output (60 to 300 articles), with production time cut from 2 hours to 10 minutes
• Lead quality held within +/-10% on 90-day revenue metrics
• LLM traffic showed higher conversion intent than traditional search

Expanding the playbook to new product categories

With the business credit card category effectively locked down in LLM visibility, Venn is expanding into invoicing and other product categories using the same playbook. The infrastructure is built. Now it's about disciplined execution across a growing content footprint, keeping the edge that lets a 23-person fintech outrank institutions with century-long head starts.

Alex is also clear-eyed about the risks. Current AEO tactics like HTML tables and schema markup could become obsolete overnight if platforms change their algorithms, the same way SEO tactics have shifted after major Google updates.

"I'm reliant on you and the team to be equally as observant and responsive so that when a change happens, I don't need to worry," Alex explains. "I'm working with AirOps. They're going to adapt so that my content and the work that I've done never becomes obsolete."