Tom Purves

Founder in Residence

AI Fund

Jun 2025 - Oct 2025 (5 months)

Starting something new with fintech and AI.

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Advisory Board Member

Velocia

May 2025 - Current (1 year 2 months)

Velocia.io is transforming urban mobility by enabling real-time data interoperability between transit agencies, fare & payment systems - enabling open loop payments, inter-agency fare transfers and loyalty/reward redemption

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Advisory Board Member

Sellit

Oct 2024 - Current (1 year 9 months)

Sellit9 is a payments fintech offering embedded and fully managed "trade-in programs as a service" for e-commerce merchants. I've joined them as an advisor on product roadmap and distribution strategy.

Partner & Co-founder

LTI

Apr 2023 - Jun 2025 (2 years 3 months)

Lahave.io (Lahave Technologies Inc.) is an boutique Fintech advisory and Startup Studio. Some of our services: Early-stage Investing & Advisory: Guiding startup founders building from zero to one. Most recent clients: A-comm.ai (agentic commerce for merchants), Sellit9 (Alternate Payment Rail and Trade-ins-as-Service for ecommerce), Grabbi.com, Velcia.io. Significant past exits: Trulioo.com, Zama.ai, Clarity Money Product Strategy (this is my super power): Roadmap, org and ecosystem transformation to seize opportunity in a rapidly shifting digital + AI landscape. Notable clients: Interac Corp., Lendio, BlytzPay, Early Warning Systems, DeutcheBank. Investor Briefings: Public, private investors, family offices and conferences. Demystifyin

CTO and CPO

MainStreet

Mar 2022 - Feb 2023 (1 year)

Intelligent tax credit, spend management and deposit products for small businesses on top open banking and open finance (Finch, Codat, Plaid, Stripe) API stacks. Owned 75-strong Product, Design and Engineering org. Led growth through 5000+ B2B customers, 20M ARRs and realizing billions in cash savings for our customers.

Vice President, Global Product Architecture

Visa

Aug 2018 - Apr 2021 (2 years 9 months)

Led development of Visa's Fintech-ready API stack generated $40M+ new ARR in under two years with developer-friendly value-add-services covering digital-first card issuance, instant tokenization, transaction controls and realtime txn data feeds. Core services that now enable Visa Intelligent Commerce protocols for Agentic Commerce. Also built and commercialized Visa’s first realtime api layer and dashboard for issuers managing interchange, loyalty and rewards tracking across all global Credit card portfolios (handling Trillions in annual payment volume TAPV). Prolific Inventor, awarded over 80 international patents in tokenization, AI, authentication, digital wallets, more: https://patents.google.com/?assignee=thomas%20purves

Advisory Board

Trulioo

Feb 2014 - Mar 2018 (4 years 2 months)

Trulioo is a world-leading vendor in global identity verification.

Vice President of Product, Visa Checkout

Visa

Dec 2011 - Aug 2018 (6 years 9 months)

Owned and scaled the Visa Checkout program from 400k to 46M registered users and 300,000 Merchants in 34 countries. Led the product through to the adoption of Visa Checkout as a global EMVCo standard as SRC or "Click-to-pay". Managed a team of 15+ product owners leading a matrix org of 100+ dedicated engineers and designers.

Business Leader, Product Innovation

Visa

Jun 2009 - Sep 2011 (2 years 4 months)

Led regional Visa Direct Strategy, launching world-first deals for bulk disbursements and Inter-bank cross-border transfers using Visa Direct. Conceived and led a product, marketing and partnership strategy to drive card usage for bill payment and recurring categories resulting in 30% growth in Visa segment revenue and >100 Million dollars txn volume.

Startup Community Organizer

StartupNorth

Jan 2006 - Sep 2011 (5 years 9 months)

Past event and community organizers of Largest Toronto start-up and tech community event series that, across 100+ DemoCamp and spin-off events, linked developers, hackers and entrepreneurs.

Group Manager, New Product Development

CIBC

Feb 2003 - Feb 2006 (3 years 1 month)

Post-acquisition of CertaPay, led product innovation for CIBC's Global Deposits and Payments division. Canada-first launch of Visa Prepaid and Visa Debit products. Pitched and won sponsor-bank bid for 'Presto Card' Canada-first transit smartcard. As steerco committee for Canada's Interac Association, cross-border network expansion deals for Interac E-transfers service, and national launch of Interac Online Pay-by-bank checkout button.

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Product Manager - Fintech Startup

Certapay Inc

Dec 2000 - Nov 2002 (2 years)

Co-invented Canada's ubiquitous "Email Money Transfers" - the world’s first realtime inter-bank p2p payment platform. Today knows as Interac E-Transfers, processing 100+B in annual payment volume. At CertaPay, we designed from scratch a net-new realtime payment rail, as a fully-managed SaaS offering which we successfully sold and integrated into every major online banking platform in Canada. Exited by acquisition to a consortium of banks under Interac Association in 2002.

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