Why Canada Needs Its Own Social Network: Inside EH!'s Mission to Reclaim Canadian Voices

In this episode of What the Tech from Boast.AI, we sit down with Jessica Glowacki, CEO and Founder of EH!, Canada's local-first social network. After 27 years in tech, Jessica decided to build something distinctly Canadian, a platform designed to lift local communities instead of extract value from them.

Boast accelerates the success of innovative businesses globally with software that integrates financial, payroll, and engineering data into a single platform of R&D intelligence.

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Intro and Outro music provided by Dennis Ma whose mixes you can find on Soundcloud at DJ DennyDex.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Hello and welcome to What the Tech from Boast, where we talk with some of the brilliant minds behind new and exciting tech initiatives to learn what it takes to tackle technological uncertainty and eventually change the world. I'm Paul Damportboast Resident Tech Journalist, and today I'm thrilled to welcome to the show Float co-founder Roslan Nikolaev. At Float, Roslan and his team are building Canada's smartest corporate cards while combining banking, payments, and spend management in one intelligent platform purpose-built for Canadian businesses. His team is on a mission to simplify business finance in Canada, with Float already being trusted by 7,000 plus companies to help finance teams save, improve compliance, and scale with confidence. It's an amazing mission, and it's very aligned with what we are very focused on here at Boast. And I can't wait to pick Russland's brain on his path through Canada's tech and business ecosystem and what's on deck for Float heading into fall 2026. So without further ado, welcome to the show, Roslan.

SPEAKER_01 0:55

Thanks for having me. Great to be here. And uh yeah, looking forward to diving in deep and um uh chatting, chatting about uh tech and where it's headed. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:02

I love to hear it. So I mean, I'd love to hear. I know I just gave a little bit of your grounding in terms of where you've come from and what your goals are at Float, but tell us about yourself. I want to hear why you have this entrepreneurial spirit. What inspired you to get into the sector that you're in? And yeah, what's the genesis story uh behind you and Float?

SPEAKER_01 1:23

Yeah, for sure. Um so um we started over Float uh back in 2020. Uh I went to the University of Waterloo. I met my one of my co-founders there. Uh we studied computer science uh together in university and um you know have both been engineers by education. Um always wanted to build a product, always wanted to create an impact and you know help solve a really meaningful problem for um uh for people, frankly, and for uh you know the country we're in. Um we ran into the space, frankly, from personal pain points, uh having to deal with expense reports, having to be out of pocket, um, having to relocate for a lot of jobs back in university. Um and every single time, you know, it's the same story. You you move to a new city, uh, the company offers to reimburse you know some money for rent, for relocation expenses, things like that. It's a great perk and benefit, but you simply like sometimes can't put it on your personal credit card because it just doesn't work. Sometimes the expense is too high. Uh, for myself being an international student in Canada, you know, I didn't have a really great credit card to lean on or a credit limit to lean on. So uh having take jobs in the US, which I was exceptionally excited about, uh, but not being able to get my money back from US companies was a really painful experience. Um, so I think dealing with that like firsthand pain point was initially what inspired us to start a business. Um and you know, I think the rest of it and how we really expanded our vision over time really came from dealing with all the same pain points that I think every SMB deals or founder deals with when they get started here in Canada, which you know change our perception in terms of how big this problem is, frankly, and how much it's actually slowing down businesses behind the scenes. And it's nobody talks about it, right? Like it's not the fun, uh it's not like the most AI-centric area of how business operates, uh, at least for now. Um, but it is definitely something that really slows business down, things like access to capital, things like access to financial infrastructure, rails in the country, you know, even the idea that you still have to go to a branch very often to send a wire transfer, even though you might be banking with you know one of the big banks in the country and storing hundreds of thousands of dollars of cash to them, uh, that just felt unacceptable to us. Um, and that's really what expanded our vision from uh a personal pain point of you know, dealing with expense reports, having to pay out of pocket, not always having access to maybe the the money that's needed to support the business expenses, um, to really trying to tackle the full sort of finance infrastructure for Canadian businesses problem end-to-end. Um so flow today, as you mentioned, you know, does a little bit of everything from corporate cards to business accounts that give you uh very high interest rates out of the box with no lockups and no minimums, uh, way higher than what you know a traditional big five bank in Canada would offer to you. Um, has access to all the payments rails completely digitally in Canada, US, uh so you don't have to deal with the friction of going to a branch every single time. You know, you need to make a payment. Um, and you know, offers 10x lower FX services, and all of it is just like packaged into a software solution that actually is intuitive and easy to use uh rather than you know dealing with uh legacy uh you know software platforms that don't scale to the modern uh workflows. And you know, we'll touch probably a little bit on AI later, but when you think about the new age of where AI is headed and how much leverage that technology can also bring to creative businesses and finance teams, um it's really hard to imagine that leverage coming on top of a legacy software platform. Uh and we really believe that you know, building this core foundations for financial infrastructure is what's gonna unlock all that leverage that will come with AI very soon down the road.

SPEAKER_00 5:10

So so many things you just said there really jumped out to me as kind of perfect because what you're talking about is that like old processes are inhibiting agility. I know that goes without saying, but to your point, even about just like the cross-border of it all, and also when you're giving people perks, how can they action on those perks? Because it's gonna slow down your ability to scale, it's gonna slow down your ability to actually be satisfying your own team even with the perks that you're offering if you're not actually giving them the ability to access them at the end of the day. And again, I'm the American on the Canadian company, so I'd love to hear your yeah.

SPEAKER_01 5:45

Well, the the funny thing is that like this experience exists very much if like some of the leading most sophisticated like US companies too, right? And in fact, like a lot of the stuff we've experienced actually came from US companies that try to maybe employ Canadian uh workforce and things like that. So it's not it is very focused on Canadian businesses and giving access to Canadian businesses, but I think the the opportunity is actually way bigger than that. Um and um yeah, like to your point, you know, it's it seems small, but it really adds up. And something that felt like a perk before actually turns into a chore, right? So you are getting money back or you are getting paid for your rent for free when you get relocated to a new city for your job, for example, which is an awesome perk, but it turns into so much of a chore that you don't even appreciate it that much at that point.

SPEAKER_00 6:31

Absolutely. And I think the other thing, too, that is maybe the biggest point I want to pull out here is that you felt this problem acutely. Like this was something that you actually experienced. So you're solving a problem that you have intimately understood because you were experiencing the pain of it all, and you found a solution, and it wasn't just for the sake of building a business. You actually wanted to tackle a problem, not just make a business for the sake of making a business, which I think is what sets apart powerful companies like Float that are able gonna expand and actually deliver on what people need, versus people who might just go in there cynically being like, oh, hey, I can put a new AI wrapper around a problem. That's not what you guys are doing here. So I'd love if you could expand on that a little bit too. Just how are you using tech to make sure that you're solving a problem that you know well and that you understand will compound and actually impact business growth if we don't find a better way?

SPEAKER_01 7:27

Yeah, totally. And you, you know, I think from the beginning when we started working the space, we knew that there was a larger business opportunity here, but there's orders of operations to how you build a business, right? And how you create something that's um really impactful for your customers, to your point, that actually solves their problem. And we've been relentless about that in the beginning. Like that we we had a lot of discipline, and I'm very glad we did to really nail down the problem initially and make sure that you're really tackling that first. And usually, you know, uh what happens when you tackle the problem really well, that's where the business opportunity comes through, right? It really becomes evident and really becomes clearer. So um we always thought about solving the problem from the beginning. Uh that's been very important to us. And when it comes to sort of like technology, the way we think about it, it it sort of comes down to a few layers for us. Uh, there's uh, you know, the foundational, you know, access to financial infrastructure in a country, right? So as I mentioned, like just sending a payment, right, takes time. You have to go into a branch manually. It's simple. You you need to enter amount when you're gonna send that money and who you're sending it to. Um, but for whatever reason, you still have to go to a physical location and do that. And I think the the core access to financial rails is sort of that, let's say, the most bottom layer that we think about in terms of you have to get that right, obviously, to deliver anything on top of that, right? Uh when it comes to automation and like real value for customers. Um then we really start thinking about you know the workflow, the software that comes with uh that payment method. So, for example, when we talk about Canadian uh EFTs, right? Uh there's a whole workflow that happens around you making that payment. And in the finance context, in any you know, professional business context, you would want to capture your bill, make sure there's an attachment included, uh, maybe assign a GL code or like a category to your payment, um, and make sure you have sufficient balances to pay that and write net terms to pay it on. Um, so that's where I think the software layer really starts to play a big role. And usually those two used to be separate solutions, right? You would basically buy the payment rail, and again, maybe a pretty poor one, but you would get access to a payment rail through a bank, and then you would get separate software that helps you manage those payments on top of the bank, right? But they would never talk well to each other. And you know, Canadian uh payments infrastructure and regulatory environment has always bifurcated those two solutions and never made them easily interoperable. Um, so to us, bringing those two together alone felt like a massive unlock for businesses. Um and that's again something that we've been building since 2020 and have you know expanded very broadly now, again, across bill payments, cards, uh reimbursements, CAD USD business accounts, access to high interest rate, uh, you know, uh earnings on any cash you hold and float, access to a charge card limit that is underrated in less than 24 hours for you, and you know, none of that friction that you normally deal with when it comes to financial services in the country. Um so all of those have been really important and foundational to us from day one, and we we've continued to build them out and accelerate uh what we do there. Um, but to your point, you know, there's now this almost like third layer that's emerging, which is sort of uh intelligence, right? Or automation that comes on top of it. And you know, it's really fascinating what's happening in the space. And we've had our fair share of you know early launches uh in this category, in this domain already, that are driving tremendous impact. And then every single day you get reminded this is like the worst this technology will ever be. Um, so you know, I think what the ceiling is in terms of the kind of outcomes you know software can achieve for your business is just now you know incredibly much higher than before. Um you know, we've from the beginning, for example, wanted to automate transaction coding for our customers. We always felt like that's a manual job that needs to go away. But before, you know, AI and LLMs, it was actually very difficult to do because every single accounting uh set of uh you know categories, GL codes, tax rates, it's very different business by business. So it was very hard to find like a normalized understanding of uh how to categorize transactions effectively. Um but with LLMs, especially with how smart they've gotten over the last few years, you know, last year, uh or actually early this year, we launched for the first time our transaction coding agent, which now does uh 90 plus percent accuracy transaction coding for most of the business on float. And that is about you know 30% better than any of the leading uh models of the shell that you would get to categorize your transactions. Um and we're now seeing that you know more than 70% of all transaction coding for customers is like automated, uh, which is really exciting for us. And again, this is just the beginning, right? Um uh but it wouldn't be possible to get to this level of transaction coding automation, for example, without having built out all the payments rails. So that the second your transaction happens, you know, your software tracks it correctly, it pulls in all the right uh data fields and metadata into that transaction record. And then when it comes to applying the right GL code, uh the intelligence can take action for you. Um, all three layers really matter. And to us, you know, when we think about the future of finance for Canadian businesses, which by the way, we think about that a lot in Edload. Um we believe that building across all three layers is really, really important. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:51

To a point that you made earlier, too, like there's no ceiling on the innovation that you can have in the space with the state of the state today in uh July 2026, which is when we're recording this interview. But again, you had to actually put those rails up and those payment rails had to actually be established. You had to actually know um firsthand what are going to be the challenges and how you can acutely again solve them too. I think I just want to keep banging that drum about how you saw a problem and we're driving a solution to that specific problem, but also it compounds if we don't solve this problem immediately. And the way that we can actually get it done is by automating some things, not taking the intelligence out of it, but having it infuse what we can actually execute on the long term. So, I mean, I know we've talked a lot about uh the motivation behind it all, but tell me a little bit about your team. I would actually love to know some of the like brain power behind all of this because it's not all just off-the-shelf AI. That's what I really want to emphasize here. You guys got in the weeds with understanding the problem that you're tackling and making a robust solution for that problem that is going to be agile and evolutionary too. So tell me about some of the folks who are on your side and uh helping make this magic happen.

SPEAKER_01 14:06

Yeah, for sure. I mean, it's great to be here and tell a story, but the team is doing all of the heavy lifting behind the scenes. Um, so um yeah, yeah, you know, we've been from the beginning, I think we've um taken a few principal approaches to how we think about talent at float. Um you know, we've probably leaned towards hiring probably more senior across the board. Uh we always believe that um uh a more empowered and end-to-end uh owning individual contributor will be effective alone than maybe a group of people, right? So minimizing headcount while maximizing outcomes, if that makes sense, is something that we've definitely thought about quite a lot as a company, as an organization. Um and you know, even up until late last year, our engineering team um was probably less than uh 40 engineers across the board with all the product that we build and develop, um, which is you know an incredible achievement, frankly, by you know the the level of talent we've been able to bring on board to actually help us build this much product this quickly. Float is still less than six years old as a company, um, and uh you know, be able to serve this many customers across the country with a you know group of people that's actually somewhat small, relatively speaking, especially when you benchmarked some international providers and players. Um and we've always taken that stance that you know a few really incredible, incredibly smart people can achieve way more than you know, a really large group of people that maybe aren't uh operating at the same bar and level. Um to actually execute that is sort of the hard part, right? And uh I think a lot of the time we actually spent uh ourselves as a as a team and also how we thought about even our talent team internally is uh really making sure that obviously the bar of entry is really high. Uh, we do a few things internally that help us make sure that you know folks we bring on board are basically hell yes from everybody in the panel, right? We we don't like uh you know soft, uh lukewarm reactions to candidates. We want everybody who joins us, our their teammates to feel like this is gonna be the best person I will get to work with. And I'm really excited to work with this person. And that's the kind of reactions we look for very explicitly from our teams, uh, which helped a lot to you know continuously bring stronger and stronger talent to the business into the into the team over time. Um, obviously a lot of things we do internally to make sure that folks have clear mandates and how they execute and what they're executing against. Um and you know, maintaining the bar is really hard to take a lot of you know managerial like courage and a lot of managerial action that's required there. Uh, but uh that's something that we've been you know holding the team accountable to and ourselves uh for a long time. Um and we believe that you know all those small things really compound and uh pay off down the road. Um and you end up with a team that you know can seem pretty lean, but can oversee just a vast, like vast breadth of product, right? And ship so much faster because you're now minimizing all this communications overhead and all this complexity that comes with really, really large workforce. Um so it takes a lot of discipline. You have to sort of like believe it and see it through before you fully realize the benefits of it. Uh, but if you commit to it and you know, if you're very intentional about it and you do it the right way, uh then we think it's you know by far the best, the most effective way to build company. And that's why we've taken it with loads so far. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:28

I I love everything you said there. I want to just draw a fine line under the discipline because I actually think that that is actually something that goes unsaid a lot of the time, that people actually have to be committed and their passion has to translate into a little bit of regimentation, just because you need to actually execute and you need to follow your own strategy and make sure that you're delivering on the points that you've established for yourself to grow the business. But what I love is that you actually kind of deliver that to your customers as well, uh, because you're able to kind of put cardrails into like what they're delivering to their own clients. And I'd love to actually go into a little bit about the product offerings and the different service lines. Um, just because I know that you guys, I said in the beginning, have that card, but there's so much more that you're actually delivering here. And I want to make sure that we shine a light on that because it is a holistic approach that you're taking that is gonna lift everybody in the ecosystem. And it's innovative in how you're deploying ML, AI, all the above to accomplish those goals. So tell me a little bit about like the differentiations and what we're accomplishing with these different service lines.

SPEAKER_01 18:34

Totally. Yeah. And you know, there's many ways to slice and dice how we think about product, but maybe I'll just talk about like the company lifecycle and journey, right? And try to relate how we think about product in that land. So um, you know, in the very beginning, uh something our mission statement is actually to empower Canadian businesses to achieve more, right? And a lot of it comes down to entrepreneurs, owner operators, founders who are doing the zero-to-one part, right? Who are just getting started. Um when you are getting started, the the first thing you obviously need is, you know, some kind of uh business account. You probably want to separate your personal finances from your corporate finances so you know, keep that cash separately. Maybe you raise capital, you want to put that money in somewhere at attractive rates. Um, you might have raised money in the USD, for example, or in the US, right? And you want to store that cash effectively too and convert maybe to CAD for payroll purposes, things like that. So, but you're still early stage, and you know, a lot of your um needs are you know somewhat simple, let's say. It's a lot of it is again access to financial rails and financial services at the ground level. Um so with float, for example, you could sign up and you know in 15 minutes get access to our business accounts in CAD USD currencies across either border, uh, convert, store cash in any one of those accounts, you know, interest rates up to 3.5%, I believe, right now, we're offering, um, which is way higher than anything you'll get from a bank. If you look at your you know checking account, uh you'll probably get 0.00002% interest rate on that.

SPEAKER_00 20:02

Roughly that.

SPEAKER_01 20:04

Um so you know, we've always taken an approach of you know not trying to uh uh you know hide the uh cost benefits behind or or only to the make cost benefits accessible to our smallest customers as well as our largest ones. So um in commercial banking, unfortunately, that's the other way, at least in Canada. Um so we make high interest rates accessible with no lockups, no medium commitments uh in both CAD USD out of the box um with no friction. Um you know, then you start thinking about you know spinning up a card so you can get a flow card, both in CAD USD. Again, no problems. Uh you can spin up a card probably in a couple clicks, uh, in a couple seconds, and that will give you everything you need to spend, pay your online bills, pay your digital advertising costs, and things like that. Um you can do reimbursements from float. So if you have maybe a couple people working for you now, uh you can reimburse them directly through Float as well, capture the receipts, categorize transactions, uh, get that workflow complete as well. Uh and finally, you you might have contractors or vendors you pay to. So Float also offers cross-border, CAD USD, international payments out of the box. You can do wires, you know, uh ACH, EFT, everything within one account. So you can effectively run your business uh as an owner operator with zero friction, never have to go to a branch in person. You get access to you know a credit limit through our charge offering as well, uh, and spend on cards. So uh you don't have to ever deal with you know the complexity of the legacy financial institutions in the country. Um, our support team median response time is less than one minute. And it's the one area where we've been actually probably less AI pilled on purpose because we believe support is exceptionally important and we actually like when our team talks to customers, and we know our customers like to talk to our team too. Um, so we've done some automations there, but we haven't gone, you know, full aggressive, you never get to talk. To a human ever-again approach. And I don't think that's the right one, frankly. And you know, as you scale, as you grow as a business, you know, you then probably hire an accountant, or you might hire a full-time finance person. That person can now come in, take over your float account from you as an owner operator, right? Run all of your finances on that system in one place. Uh, do all of your again payments, but at much larger scale, float offers all types of approval workflows, uh, all types of controls around spend, uh, user management, permission, access control, uh, actually a pretty sophisticated layer and suite of software to help you manage that spend once it starts to scale. Um and um, you know, the other benefit specifically we find for finance teams is this like AI operational leverage, right? So where float starts to categorize transactions for your team automatically and basically helps you uh streamline all of your transaction coding in the month end. So you're not spending time chasing employees for receipts, you're not spending time, you know, like manually uploading stuff into the system. Um, float does the coding for you, float captures and matches receipts for you uh directly automatically in the app, uh, all of that fun stuff. You can access a receipt literally the second you swipe the card and we'll match it to the right transaction, uh, which is uh you know still pretty exciting uh feature for a lot of our customers, even though it's been out for quite some time now with float. Um but uh you know, a lot of these things that you know normally take a lot of manual overhead. Like think about how much time it's taking you to fill out your last expense report. Um and imagine doing it as simple as you know, swipe your card, you get a text, reply for a seat, and you're done, right? And uh that's how long it takes. Um and uh we obviously now also serve like much bigger companies and teams as well, you know, thousand plus employee companies too. So float software and again AI really scales to much larger use cases as well. Um, we don't really play like in the enterprise market. We don't think that's really where we want to go, frankly, long term. Um but uh, you know, customers from you know uh a handful of employees up to thousands of users, you can run your entire business in float and streamline your financial workflows as much as possible. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 24:11

Well, that's the I I think that last point you just made there is what makes Float such an attractive offering to anybody in the SMB space or even the mid-market space, because you get enterprise capabilities with your tool set and you're actually delivering the agility that these teams need to be responsive, but also to deliver on what they have promised to. So, I mean, yeah, I think that's the biggest point. Um, our Googles, our Amazons, they've had the budgets to actually do all of this stuff for a long time. You're making it accessible now at a scale that SMBs can actually latch on to and learn more about their customers, learn how to deliver better for their customers, and also not have to overextend their resources because you actually have baked that in and that's invaluable.

SPEAKER_01 24:59

So and you touched on SMB point. Maybe I'll double click on that because it's actually really important to us to make sure we, you know, give Canadian SMBs access to services that traditionally they would never have access to, right? What we actually saw in the beginning when we just started working on float is that Canada was almost like uniquely underserved in this category, that there's bad banking experiences everywhere in the world, right? Uh, but what made Canada unique was this sort of like dual problem where we saw the local players, there's not a lot of competition and there's no lot of incentives to innovate, and they're not great at building software or modern experiences. And you might have witnessed this through personal banking, for example, and experiences like that. Uh, but they're way behind. And uh there's no hope that they will catch up anytime soon. And you have international providers that you know really focus on the software layer but don't do a good job of localizing the community customer needs. Um, and when you don't bring those two together, it actually becomes very challenging to again lean into automation, lean into streamlining your workflows and things like that. So uh to us, it's been very important to, as I mentioned earlier, give access of the full benefit of the financial infrastructure we have in Canada to a business from the day they incorporate and not gated behind an account manager that you have to call at your bank and spend you know four hours in a call with just to convince them to give you access to a trade desk so you can get lower FX fees, right? Yeah. So it's been very important to us to make this financial service as accessible as possible. And that's how we believe we will achieve our mission, right? Which is about igniting the full potential of community businesses. Uh, to us, it's very important that you know financial infrastructure, access to capital, all of that becomes uh way easier in Canada so you can actually focus on building a business. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 26:41

No, and it's again, like your understanding of what the actual barriers are to entry for a lot of this is what's making the difference here. It's not just because you put an AI around it or you put some ML behind it, it's because you know what the actual problem is. You know, as a human, the path to actually solving all of this. And you're empowering SMBs, which I think is actually a huge thing that goes unspoken in the community. Again, enterprises have access, they have budgets. This is actually a one-stop shop for a lot of what you need to do to run a successful and also scalable business without losing sight of like what your actual reality is today and what you can actually deliver tomorrow. You're gonna make sure that none of that gets lost in the sauce, more or less. But um, yeah, Rotom, this is music to my ears. I absolutely love it. So, last question what's next for the rest of uh 2026 for you guys?

SPEAKER_01 27:36

Yeah, I mean, we, you know, we just close a pretty big round of capital that we were really excited about. Um, I think practically speaking, we're you know, back to building. We've tried to stay as focused on building this whole time as possible. And um, you know, the roadmap is very exciting to us. We think we're just getting started in terms of what we can deliver, in terms of, as I mentioned, you know, access to financial services, capital, um, you know, being able to help you centralize all of your expenses, unlock the leverage of you know, AI in your workflows of business uh and in your finance teams. Um uh so for us, we're just getting started. And it feels still very early in the journey. I think flow probably serves like just under uh 1% of all Canadian businesses today. And uh to us, you know, going to capture the rest, 99% of the market is where we want to go next. And uh we'll spend a lot of time, you know, making our products as great as possible and also you know getting the word out there that there's other options as well in the market. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 28:29

Yeah. Well, I know I'm personally excited to hear all of this just because I have felt these uh challenges that you've described uh personally. So I love to hear that you guys have developed this for the Canadian market. I think there is so much expansion opportunity for you guys, well beyond even that. So can't wait to see what you do in 2026 and beyond. And Russland, I I can't thank you enough for joining us. This was fantastic and uh a good, I think, model that I want our listeners to follow in terms of making sure that they're focused on solving a problem, not just building a business, solving a problem. I the theme of the show at this point. But this was fantastic.

SPEAKER_01 29:08

Yeah, thanks for organizing this. This is great.