Two years after it raised $2.95 million to scale its software for speeding up back office operations at banks, credit unions and fintechs, Charlottetown’s PayTic has won the Accounting Tech of the Year award at the European Fintech Awards, a competition organized by trade publication FinTech Intel.

Held in London this year, the awards have at various times in their history been affiliated with backers ranging from Visa, to Amazon Web Services, to the World Bank. PayTic, meanwhile, was founded by CEO Imad Boumahdi. He launched the business on the premise that most fintech solutions are aimed at end users, leaving a gap in the market for software aimed at payment processors.

“Accounting of payments has always been a challenge for finance teams, auditors, and regulators,” wrote Boumahdi on social media. “We are proud we made it simple for everyone and we are so grateful we are being recognised for that globally.”

PayTic, which has 22 employees shown in LinkedIn data, dates back to 2018, when Boumahdi immigrated to Prince Edward Island. By the time he arrived in Charlottetown he had about 15 years of experience in the payments industry, and had come to believe that many companies’ payment processing was being hampered by outdated backend technology that was poorly suited to consolidating large amounts of data. He would later go on to say that many institutions were still using Excel to reconcile payments at the time.

The company remained in “stealth mode” until 2022, when it announced the nearly $3 million funding raise, which was led by Halifax-based Build Ventures, with Charlottetown-based Island Capital Partners, Halifax-based Concrete Ventures and Moroccan VC firm Outlierz Ventures also joining.

“There is no one technology that streamlines everything and enables access to the payments ecosystem more seamlessly,” said Build Ventures General Partner Rob Barbara last year, commenting on an investment his fund made in PayTic. “This is a global solution that we expect to see growing across North America, the U.K., the Middle East and Africa.”