ONE-ON-ONE
Riding the waves GUY FIETZ , CEO AT CANADIAN PAYMENTS PROVIDER GIGADAT, OUTLINED TO EDITOR-IN CHIEF SIMON PLANZER HOW HIS COMPANY STAYS AT THE FRONT OF A HIGHLY COMPETITIVESECTOR
Simon Planzer: Let's start with the Gigadat story. How did the business come about? Guy Fietz: We started out in the telecoms space, operating third-party billing where we established the first clearing house in Canada. We ran that business for around 15 years but saw things becoming more difficult. The big carriers were commoditizing everything and taking more and more of the revenue share. We could see a slow death in that in that market so I started to look at what alternatives there might be out there. We developed a direct debit solution and tried to find a sweet spot in different markets. Eventually we alighted on gaming and started seeing some uptake there so we refocused our efforts and the rest is history. Over the next several years we became a market leader and we have managed to retain that lead in the Canadian market. We've grown exponentially year over year for the last 10 years now and gone from an infancy level operation to a the sophisticated, advanced, and highly automated platform that we are operating today. In the process we have gone from around eight to 10 employees to 150 employees, and we're now processing billion of dollars a year. SP : Was there a key moment where you thought, this is going to be a winner?
GF : There really was. We were searching for multiple markets that would adopt the online debit solution and gaming was one that picked it up very quickly. We saw a couple of big-name brands out there come on board. Their original forecast was something to the effect of $500,000 in transaction value per month for the first year. But within the first two months that had grown to over $5 million in transaction value, and that was the point we knew we really had something. The adoption rate was just completely vertical, the consumers loved the option in the cashier pages, and so we knew we were on to something big. SP: Some people may say payments is payments, it's all the same! It's processing transactions. How can a payment provider gain a competitive advantage and stand out in that market? GF: Our philosophy has always been to provide a consultative service and that’s what makes us different. A lot of the big processors out there are on “set it and forget it” mode. Once a merchant is integrated, then it's up to them to utilize the tools available and access the reporting data. Whereas we're always consulting with our merchants, trying to find out what they're looking for, what their needs are and maybe what
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IMGL MAGAZINE | MARCH 2026
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